LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shelf ...aW 5 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



SEP 9 1116 



A KEY 



TO 



True Religion. 




By J. B. WOLFE. 



SEP 9 1886 ' 



9 l«B6y^' 



^ washihoI 



CHICAGO: 
F. H. Revell, 148 AND 150 Madison Street, 

Publisher of Evangelical Literature. 



^"^gi^^ 



Copyright entered according to act of Congress, in office of the Librarian 
at Washington, D. C, in the year A. D., 1885, by J. B. Wolfe. 



PREFACE. 

That which has perplexed us most in the study of 
what is popularly known as "Theology," is the diffi- 
culty of understanding some of its more frequently 
employed and important terms. To read them has 
often loaded the memory with words without ' influ- 
encing the understanding. After considerable study 
and as much confusion we prayerfully turned almost 
wholly to The Great Lamp of Truth and soon ascer- 
tained that the Bible is its own best commentary. 
In securing its definition of sin we experienced a 
mental relief if not a spiritual benefit: it seemed to 
lead us into a new world of light and in it we dis- 
covered what we consider to be A Key which unlocks 
many hitherto mysteries of True Religion. As we 
employ it new beauties unfold to our mental vision, 
and the Divinity of Christianity and its adaptation to 
the moral and spiritual wants of the race are more 
manifest to us. 

While thousands may observe what it reveals as 
the fundamental element of Christianity, none have 
employed it, so far as we have ascertained, in the ex- 
planation of the System of Spiritual Truth as taught 
in the Holy Scriptures, and, to some degree, given in 
this work. 

We have endeavored to give proper credit to every 
author from whom we have quoted, but such is thje 

(3) 



4 Preface. 

imperfection of recollection that we may have failed 
to do so. The quotations in some instances are 
lengthy, not that we fully endorse all that they con- 
tain, but because we desire, 

1. To avoid garbled statements, which would only 
seem to corroborate positions assumed in this volume; 
and, 

2. To show that the essential element of True Re- 
ligion can be found in the fragmentary utterances of 
men of different Religious Denominations; and in 
others who, while assailing Christianity, unwittingly 
utter its fundamental truth. 

It is not written for the scholarly critic, but for 
" the common people." We have not thought of pro- 
ducing a work that shall stand the test of literary 
criticism, nor one without defect in the eyes of "The- 
ologians," but have striven to make plain such truths 
as may lead the sincere seeker for spiritual light into 
the knowledge and favor of God. Hoping and pray- 
ing that they may be instrumental in bringing souls 
at last where all are light and love forever, we send 
these pages forth to the world. Author. 



A KEY TO TRUE RELIGION. 



CHAPTER I. 

PRELIMINARY STATEMENTS. 

There is a key to every mystery whether of Nat- 
ure, Providence or Grace, for He who created and 
governs the illimitable Universe, knows all things. 
With Him are the secrets of all mysteries, a knowledge 
of many of which He encourages us to seek. Nat- 
ure has her mysteries, but many that once seemed 
to defy human investigation have gradually yielded 
to scientific research, and the Key to her wonders is 
being placed in human hands. 

Providences often confound us. They move from 
a higher plane than we can see, but what are darkest 
to us are without shadow in the Divine mind. 
Could we behold them from a more elevated posi- 
tion than we now occupy, they would appear, not 
in the confusion of mystery, but in the light of 
heavenly wisdom. Now and then we receive that 
which makes plain what, in some of them, once 
seemed obscure. We shall sometime see clearly 
what is now observed through " a glass darkly." 

(5) 



A Key to True Religion. 



Thus it is in Revelation: though it has given all 
along its history, sufficient light to lead the sinful 
and wretched into spiritual victories and joyful ex- 
periences, yet there has been much obscurity as well 
as revelation. 

There is a necessity for a clearer understanding 
of Christian doctrine — for simple statements of its 
truths. This appears from 

1. The Divine Creed given the race is formulated 
in the facts of the Bible, rather than in systemati- 
cally arranged propositions, and men are directed to 
seek a knowledge of it. ''Search the Scriptures," 
are words of the Divine Teacher that imply the ne- 
cessity for a close, earnest, prayerful study in order 
to learn their teaching and to enjoy the experience 
they offer. They have a depth of beauty still unex- 
plored by human eyes and a rich treasury for enjoy- 
ment in this world to which the heart has not yet 
attained. Herein Revelation presents a field for dis- 
covery as truly as does Nature. 

2. The ambiguity of meaning in many of the 
terms employed in the teaching of Christianity. 

(1.) The terms — 

The words sin^ depravity^ carnal 'tnind^ r&pent- 
amxie^ faith^ new hirth^ sanctification^ holiness and 
others, while they should suggest clearly defined 
ideas to the mind, often present more of mystery. 
Nor do we find satisfactory statements of them in 
the discussions of Theology. 



Preliminary Statements. 



(2.) In the numerous statements by able religious 
teachers, some of which are as follows: " Can we 
shut our eyes to the fact that the rehgious opinions of 
mankind are in a state of flux ? . . . The religion 
of Jesus has probably always suflered more from 
those who have misunderstood than from those who 
have opposed it. Of the multitudes who confess 
Christianity at this hour, how many have clear in 
their minds the cardinal distinction established by 
its Founder between 'born of the flesh,' and 'born 
of the Spirit.'"^ 

Kespecting spirituality another says: "Uncon- 
sciously our modern thought separates it from every- 
thing definite and certain, considering it as lawless 
and capricious, in some sort a part of the mystic's 
reverie and the poet's dream. So long as this is so,> 
the difficulty is increased of making progress be- 
tween superstition on the one hand, and material- 
ism on the other, into inclusive light and life. It 
must be taken from the realm of vagaries, and shown 
to be something capable of definite and scientific 
statement, not as a dogma, but as a law, a principle, 
before it can accomplish the full work for which our 
time is hungering. In other words, it must in some 
degree, as far as possible, in the nature of things, 
and yet always far enough for the comprehension of 
those spiritually inclined, he stated in terms of the 
understcmding. " f 

* Natural Law in the Spiritual World. f Ecce Spiritus. 



A Key to True Religion. 



Another says: " Sometimes when we consider 
the simplicity of the words of inspiration, and then 
remember how the Churches and the Ministry have 
wandered from the original sense of those words, and 
how the simplest terms of the Bible have grown 
into mysterious technicalities, producing almost end- 
less disputations, we are astonished that so much of 
the essence of Christianity has been preserved, and 
that the truth is still ours, substantially as it was 
first delivered to the Church. " * 

Another: "Protestantism has ever been con- 
scious of imperfections and weaknesses, making nec- 
essary some kind of siftings, modifications and re- 
statements that it may be purged from unreasonable 
and unscriptural features, from relics of Popery and 
mediseval civilization, to say nothing of the ages an- 
terior." f 

3. The condition of the masses. 

We do not deny that Christianity is often accepted 
and its blessings enjoyed without attaining to its 
philosophy. It is well for thousands that their ex- 
perience is more satisfactory than their knowledge 
of the Christian System or of Theological terms. 
But would not their experience and field of useful- 
ness be enlarged by a clearer understanding of them? 
Would they not be better qualified to resist the 
sophistries and temptations of the world ? Are not 



* Aspects of Christian Experience, 
f Problem of Religious Progress. 



Preliminary Statements. 



many confused and others in spiritual darkness for 
lack of clearer light ? Does not such a want often 
result in superstition and fanaticism if not sin ? All 
must acknowledge that simplicity of statement is 
necessary to the understanding by the masses in 
every department of human instruction, and in none 
more than in Christianity. Another reason, and 
one that should encourage an effort is: 

4. It is possible. 

It is as unnecessary as it is embarrassing to 
acknowledge that we are required to sustain a char- 
acter, that, while ''its nature is seen at once and 
intuitively by the mind, is incapable of definition. " * 

There are many things that come within our 
observation and into the experience of every-day 
life, the meaning of which we have no doubt. We 
express our ideas by words which the mind readily 
comprehends. If we say tree^ the word is no sooner 
uttered than the mind calls up the picture of a tree^ 
and thus it is with any word familiar to us. 

This will equally apply to words expressive of the 
abstract. In the words: Joy and sorrow^ jpleasure 
cmd jpain^ love and hate^ though abstract, yet there 
is no difficulty in understanding what is usually 
intended by them — no more difficulty than those 
expressive of the concrete though the mind forms no 
picture of them. We converse about our secular, 
social and political affairs with about equal intelligi- 

*The Divine Government. 



10 A Key to True Beligion. 

bility, the one with the other, and there is no reason 
we should not converse with as much intelligibihty 
about the doctrines, precepts and experience of the 
Bible. Yet it cannot be truthfully said that we 
always do so. 

As persons professedly stand in the experience of 
faith and of the divine favor, we are inclined to ask: 
What difference in their present and former experi- 
ences? Wherein does the Christian differ in his 
experience from that of the sinners ? What change 
if any has been wrought within him ? How may it 
be obtained? What is the extent of its enjoyment? 
These are questions men have a right to ask, and 
the world to know, so far as words can intelligently 
convey them to the mind, to which revelation clearly 
responds and which Christian teachers should be 
able to give. 

Too many are inclined to the belief that Christian- 
ity is something that can only be experienced but 
not intelligently defined — can be enjoyed but is 
incapable of definition. We are certainly not neces- 
sarilly left to such confusion. True, it is experi- 
mental and not a mere system of truth for the intel- 
lect as Geology or Astronomy; true, it is the only 
religion that can satisfy the soul, yet it is a system 
of truth for the intellect and can be presented in 
terms of the understanding. The Scriptures are not 
given to conceal but to reveal, and where they state 
a doctrine, duty or experience is it not to enlighten 



Preliminary Statements. 11 

the understanding as well as to aid the heart ? A Key 
that makes plain Christian doctrine and experience 
is cognizable and can be employed to dissipate doubt 
and advance the Redeemer's Kingdom among men. 
It must serve to explain the words, — sm, dejpra/vity^ 
faith^ repentance^ regeneration^ new hirth^ sancti- 
fication^ holiness and kindred words, in their appli- 
cation to character and conduct. Revelation gives 
it, human hearts enjoy what is implied in its experi- 
ence, and a word can convey an intelligent idea 
of it. 

A BASILARY STATEMENT. 

It is expressed in a word — Love. Love is aU 
that is right in heart and most beautiful and blissful 
in Kfe. It is the experience man ruined by sin, the 
condition of heart Jesus came to restore, and that 
which alone qualifies us to be partakers of the inheri- 
tance of the saints in light. 

There is no more doubt about what is meant by 
the experience of love than there is of the word 
Pree^ and when love to God and man becomes the 
mainspring of any one's life that person experiences 
the religion of Christ — is a Christian. 

"I'm apt to think, the man 
That could surround the sum of all things and spy 
The heart of God, and secrets of His empire. 
Would speak tut love; with him the brightest result, 
"Would change the hue of intermediate scenes. 
And make one thing of all theology." 



CHAPTEK II. 

THE CORROBOKATIVE TESTIMONY OF MEN, WIT- 
TINGLY AND UNWITTINGLY GIVEN. 

' ' Society indeed has its great men and its little 
men,' as the earth has its mountains and its valleys. 
But the inequality of intellect, like the inequalities of 
the surface of our globe, bear so small a proportion 
to the mass that in calculating its great revolutions 
they may safely be neglected. 

The sun illuminates the hills whilst it is still 
below the horizon, and truth is discovered by the 
highest minds a little before it becomes manifest to 
the multitude. This is the extent of their superiority. 
They are the first to catch and reflect a hght which, 
without their assistance, must in a short time, be 
visible to those who lie far beneath them.""^ 

Religious teachers have for centuries sought a 
clearer explanation of true religion; and others, not 
professing a belief in Christianity, some of whom 
rejecting it, have endeavored to tell what it is. 
Their efibrts have not been in vain, but like the 
oscillations of the disturbed needle, while they have 
been first on one side and then on the opposite side 
of truth, the polar brightness has now and then been 

*Macauley. 

(12) 



Corrohoratwe Testimony of Men. 13 

revealed and they have caught scintillations and felt 
something of the glory of the guiding star. 

Because man is a moral being he will have a 
religion of some kind, and his heart seeking an 
object on which to bestow affection and repose a 
restful confidence, indicate the only religion that can 
satisfy him. 

Let us hear the testimony of men : " The meanest 
hut mth love in it is fit for the gods, and a palace with- 
out love is a den fit for wild beasts. Thafs my doc- 
trine. " "^ This has the appearance of a creed how- 
ever much he may deny it, and when he declared 
that he desired no other religion than that of love, 
he recognized the central truth of Christian experi- 
ence, but in deriding Christianity he shows either his 
misapprehension or willful misrepresentation of it. 

In the declaration: "When I see written over 
the door of any church no other creed than love to 
God and man, I will become a member of that 
church," f is the expressed need of every heart. Had 
its distinguished author seen with clearer vision — 
from a httle different observatory, he might have 
beheld it written with greater or less legibility over 
the door of every church in Christendom, however 
untenable the creed of some of the religious denomi- 
nations. This is apparent from the following senti- 
ments expressed by men prominent in the respective 
churches to which they have or do belong; ''We 

*R. G. Ingersoll. t -A-braham Lincoln. 



14 A Key to True Religion. 

read in the Gospel that the Jews often put questions 
to our dear Savior. Some questioned Him through 
malice to tempt and to ensnare Him in His speech; 
others questioned Him through curiosity; and others, 
through a sincere desire to know what they must 
believe and do, in order to be saved. Jesus answered 
all of them with admirable sweetness and charity. 
Thus one day, the Pharisees came to Him, and one 
of them, a doctor of the law, tempted Him saying : 
'Master, which is the great commandment in the 
law ? ' Jesus answered and said unto him : ' Thou 
shall love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, 
and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, 
and with thy whole strength. This is the greatest 
and the first commandment. And the second is like 
to this : ' Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. ' 
. . . True love naturally tends to union with the 
object beloved. It is like a golden chain which 
binds together the hearts of those that love. Hence, 
he who loves, always desires the presence of the 
object of his love. Divine charity, also, establishes, 
between God and man, a communication of goods 
and a union of sentiments. . . . Behold, the great 
things which divine love affects ! We are the sons of 
God, as the Holy Scriptures say : ' Ye are the sons 
of the living God. ' In this divine adoption there 
are infused into the soul not only the grace, the 
charity and other gifts of the Holy Ghost, but the 
Holy Ghosife Himself, who is the first, the un- 



Corrohorative Testimony of Men. 15 

created Gift that God bestows on us. . . . But 
neither is this gift, great though it be, great enough 
for charity which God bears to us. God, in his 
immense charity for us, wishes to bestow greater 
things upon us, in order to raise us still higher in 
grace and in the participation of His divine nature. 
Hence He goes so far as to give Himself to us, in 
order to sanctify and adopt us in person. 
From what has been said it is easy to see why 
charity is called the queen of all \drtues. ' God is 
charity' says St. John (i. iv. 8.). 'He who abides 
in charity, abides in God, and God in him. ' . . . 
Charity makes the just strong; it makes them 
ti'iumph over their passions, over the most violent 
temptations and the greatest trials ; it makes them 
obedient; they promptly follow the voice of God ; it 
makes them pure ; they love God only and love Him 
because He deserves to be loved on account of His 
most amiable, infinite perfections. Charity makes 
the just ardent; they wish to inflame all hearts and 
to see them consumed mth divine love. Charity 
I'omshes the soul of the just, so that they seem to 
be no longer occupied with earthly things, but with 
loving God alone. Charity makes the just sigh 
unceasingly ; it fills their souls with evident desire 
to quit the earth in order to be united to God in 
heaven, and there to love Him with all their strength. 
. . . Charity is thus the queen of all virtues : 
it produces them, and brings them to perfection ; it 



16 A Key to True Religion. 

embraces them all, directs them all to God, gives 
them all their supernatural dignity and value, and 
makes them truly deserving of an eternal reward."* 
' ' In Him (Christ) was the light of perfect love . . . 
It is the main and positive virtue of which self renuncia- 
tion is but the negative side . . . What is God? 'God 
is love.' And is not this, of which we have been 
speaking, love; true, pure love! Deny it, and bear 
upon your head, the indignation of mankind. But 
admit it; and what do you admit ? That God's love 
is poured into human hearts. Yes, into human 
hearts! Oh! sad, sad — frail, erring, broken, are 
they often; yet God's spirit is breathing through 
them; else were they despoiled, desolate, crushed; 
beyond recovery, beyond hope. It is the same spirit 
of love that enshrines the earth and enrobes the 
heavens with beauty; and if there were not an eye 
of love to see it, a heart of love to feel it, all nature 
would be the desolate abode of creatures as desolate. 
. . . Again, the entire social condition of humanity is 
a school. The ties of society atfectingly teach us to 
love one another. A parent, a child, a husband or 
wife, or associate without love^ is nothing but a cold 
marble image; or rather a machine, an annoyance, 
a something in the way to vex and pain us. The 
social relations not only teach love, but demand it. 
Show me a society no matter how intelhgent, accom- 
plished and refined, but where love is not; where 

* Michael Muller, Roman Catholic. 



Corrohorative Testimony of Men. 17 

there is ambition, jealousy and distrust, not simplic- 
ity, confidence and kindness; and you show me an 
imhappy society. All will complain of it. Its 
punctilious decorum, its polished insincerity, its 
threatening urbanity, give no satisfaction to any of 
its members. TMiat is the difficulty ? What does 
it mean ? I answer, it Avants love; and if it will not 
have that, it must sufier; and it ought to sufier."* 

"Purity of heart and life, Christ's spirit of love 
toward God and man; this is all in all. This is only 
the essential thing. The church is important only 
as it ministers to this; and every church which so 
ministers is a good one, no matter how, when or 
where it grew up, no matter whether it worship on 
its knees or on its feet, or whether its ministers are 
ordained by pope, bishop, presbyter, or people; 
these are secondary things, and of no comparative 
moment. The church which opens on heaven is that 
and that only, in which the spirit of heaven dwells. 
If God be loved and Jesus Christ be welcomed to 
the soul, and His instructions be meekly and wisely 
heard and the solemn purpose gTow up to do all duty 
amidst all conflict, sacrifice and temptation, then the 
true end of the church is answered. " f 

"What shall I particularly strive for? To obtain 
a more tender and affectionate and consuming sense 
of the love of Christ to my soul. . . . The power of a 

*Orville Dewey, D.D., Unitarian. 
tW. E. Chaning, D.D., Unitarian. 
2 



18 A Key to True Religion. 

Christian's hope to keep him from fear, is in its be- 
ing accompanied with the love of Grod shed abroad 
in his heart by the Holy Ghost. . . . Love is the 
master principle of religion." ^ 

*' Christ came not into the world to fill our heads 
with mere speculations, to kindle a fire of wrangling 
^nd contentious disputes amongst us, and to warm 
our spirits against one another with angry and peev- 
ish debates, while, in the meantime, our hearts re- 
main all ice within towards God, and have not the 
least spark of true heavenly love to melt and thaw 
them. Christ came not to possess our brains with cold 
opinions, that send down a freezing and benumbing 
influence into our hearts. Christ was a master of 
the life, not of the school; and He is the best Chris- 
tian whose heart beats with the purest pulse toward 
heaven, not he whose head spins the finest cobweb, "f 

''Love is the heart of religion, the fat of the of- 
fering; it is the grace which Christ inquires most 
after. ' Peter, lovest thou me ? ' Love makes our 
services acceptable, it is the musk that perfumes 
them. It is the queen of the graces, it outshines all 
the other, as the sun the lesser planets." % 

'' Love is the great instrument and engine of nat- 
ure, the bond and cement of society, the spring and 
spirit of the Universe. It is that active, restless 
nature that must of necessity exert itself; and 

* Bishop Mcllvane, Episcopal. f Cudwortli. 

X Bishop R. Watson, Episcopal. 



Corroboratwe Testimony of Men. 19 

like fire, to which it is so often compared, it is not a 
free agent to choose whether it will heat or no, but it 
streams forth by natural results and unavoidable em- 
anations. So that it will fasten upon an inferior, 
unsuitable object rather than none at all. The soul 
may sooner leave ofi" the body to subsist than to 
live; and like the vine, it withers and dies if it has 
nothing to embrace. Now this afiection, in the 
state of innocence, was happily pitched upon its 
right object; it flamed up in direct fervours of de- 
votion to God, and in collateral emissions of charity 
to its neighbor." ^ 

" God has, in the ordinances of creation, made it 
natural for children to love their parents, and for 
parents to love their children. And such, moreover, 
is the origin and foundation of natural and moral 
institutions. And hence it is obvious, that no moral 
precept could have been so perfect a test of man's loy- 
alty to God as was the positive precept which was 
originally given Adam for this purpose. The par- 
ent and the child, the husband and the wife, the 
king and the subject, might have mutually loved 
each other, and nevertheless, been at heart disloyal 
to their Creator. But the spirit of disloyalty cher- 
ished in the heart Tvdll as certainly lead to man's con- 
demnation and final ruin as will the open and overt 
transgression of any law, whether it be moral or 
positive. . . . A^Tiy should beings who have been 

* South. 



20 A Key to True Religion. 

SO constituted as to love that which is lovely, and 
hate that only which is hateful, ever cherish in their 
hearts enmity to One who is Himself the very es- 
sence of all that is lovely and beautiful in the Uni- 
verse! . . . There is no neutral ground here. 
It is either loyalty or disloyalty; it is either obedi- 
ence or disobedience; it is either love or it is hatred. 
. . . Previous to man's sin he loved God with 
all his heart and soul and mind and strength. But 
no sooner did he transgress the commandments of 
his Maker than his heart was filled with enmity. 
. . . But ' woe unto him who is at enmity with 
his Maker.' To such a one earth has no happiness, 
and Heaven itself has none. . . . Ah, yes; 
the flames of torment must be extinguished in the 
soul, the feeling of enmity must be taken away from 
the human heart, and the heart must be filled with 
love and peace and joy, before man can be made 
happy in any part of the universe." * 

'* There is a tacit comparison of these two com- 
mandments (Matt. 22: 37-40) to a hook in the wall 
on which are hung all the books of the law and the 
prophets. As the hook supports all, so to keep these 
commandments is to do all that is required by the 
Scriptures. He who loves God as required will 
keep all of God's commandments, and he who loves 
his neighbors fulfill every obligation to his neigh- 
bor." t 

* R. Milligan, Christian. f J. W. McGarvey, Christian. 



CwroboTative Testimony of Men. 21 

"God's nature is love, and His perfections foim 
a unity. The knowledge of them produces love and 
unity in all those who receive a full renovating im- 
pression of them in the Gospel." "^ 

"So then the Christian life begins with love to 
God though Christ, developes itself in love for the 
neighbor, and is consumated in the perfection of this 
two-fold love. Surely religion justly bears the beau- 
tiful name which is sometimes given it, the name of 
the religion of love. 

"May the weight of selfishness and ambition, of 
cold indifference to the neio:hbor's weal, and of bit- 
ter hatred toward those who injm'e us, more and 
more vanish from our heart, and love to God and 
our brethren gain a stronger and stronger sway with- 
in us, so that we also, when ere long the kingdom 
of love appears in its consumation, may be found 
worthy to share its glory. " f 

"Of love in general," Swedenborg says: 

"1. Man's very life is love ; and such as the love 
is, such is the hfe; yes, such is the Avhole man. But 
it is the dominant, or reigning love, which makes 
the man. This love has many loves subordinate to 
it, wliich are derivations. Their appearance is under 
another aspect ; but yet every one of them is in the 
dominant love, and with it they make one kingdom. 
The dominant love is as their kinsf and head : it 

* Alexander Campbell, Christian. Bap. Vol. 2, p. 163. 
t Julius Muller, D D., Lutheran. 



22 A Key to True Religion. 

directs them ; and through them as through mediate 
ends it regards and attains its own end, which is 
the primary and the ultimate of all ; and this both 
directly and indirectly. 2. That which is of the 
dominant love, is what is loved above all things. 
What a man loves above all things is continually 
present in his thought, because it is in his will and 
it makes his veriest life. For example, one who loves 
wealth above all things, whether money or posses- 
sions, is continually considering in his mind how he 
may procure it, rejoices inmostly when he acquires 
it, inmostly grieves when he loses it, his heart is in 
it. He who loves himself above all things is mind- 
ful of himself in every thing; he thinks of himself, 
speaks of himself, acts for the sake of himself ; for 
his life is life of self. 3. A man has for an end 
that which he loves above all things ; this he regards 
in all things and in every single thing. It is his wdll 
like the latent flow of a river which sweeps along 
and bears him away even when he is acting in 
some other way, for it is that which animates him. 
Such is that which one man searches out in another, 
and also sees ; and by it he either leads him or acts 
with him. 4. A man is wholly such as the domi- 
nant principle of his life is ; by this he is distin- 
guished from others ; according to this his heaven is 
made, if he is good, and his hell, if he is evil ; it is 
his very will, his proprium, and his nature, for it 
is the very esse of his hfe. This cannot be changed 



Corroboratwe Testimony of Men. 23* 

after death for it is the man himself. 5. All that 
gives enjoyment, satisfaction and happiness to any 
one, comes to him fi'om his ruling love and according 
to it. For a man calls that which he loves enjoy- 
ment, because he feels it ; but that which he thinks- 
and does not love, he may also call enjoyment,, 
but it is not the enjoyment of his hfe. The love's- 
enjoyment is what is good to a man, but the un- 
delightful is what to him is evil. 6. There are tAvo- 
loves from which, as from their very fountains, all 
goods and truths exists ; and these are two loves 
from which all evils and falsities exist. The two- 
loves from which are all goods and truths, are love 
to the Lord and love towards the neighbor ; but the 
two loves from which are all evils and falsities, are 
the love of self and the love of the world. The two- 
latter when they are predominant, are w^holly opposed 
to the former. 7. The two loves from which all 
goods and truths are, which, as was said, are love 
to the Lord and love towards the neighbor, make 
heaven with man, for they reign in heaven; and be- 
cause they make heaven with man; they also make 
the church with him. The two loves from which 
all catIs and falsities are, which, as was said, are the 
love of self and the love of the world, make hell 
with men ; for they reign in hell ; consequently alse 
they destroy the church with him. 8. The twa 
loves from which are all goods and truths, which, as 
was said, are the loves of heaven, open and form the 



24 A Key to True Religion. 

internal spiritual man, for they reside there ; but 
the two loves from which are all evils and falsities, 
which, as was said, are the loves of hell, when they 
are predominant close and destroy the internal 
spirirtual man, and cause the man to be natural and 
sensual according to the quantity and quahty of their 
dominion. " ^ 

' ' We are constituted with affections, of which we 
can no more divest ourselves than of our skin. Be 
the object which we love noble or base, good or bad, 
generous or selfish, holy or sinful, belonging to earth 
or heaven, some object we must love. It were as 
easy for a man to live without breathing, as to live 
without loving. It is not more natural for fire to 
burn, or light to shine, than man to love. And the 
commandment, ' Love not the world, neither the 
things that are in the world,' had been utterly im- 
practicable, and impossible, save in conjunction with 
that other commandment, ' Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy Grod with all thy heart, and soul and mind. ' It 
is with man's soul as with the plant which is creeping 
on the earth; to upbraid it for its baseness, to reproach 
it for the mean objects around which its tendrils are 
entwined, will never make it stand erect ; jow. can 
not raise it unless you present some lofty object to 
which it may cling. It is with our hearts as with 
vessels ; 3^ou cannot empt}^ them of one element 
without admitting or substituting another in its 
place. ... 

* The Christian Relii^ion. 



Corroboratwe Testimony of Men. 25 

" This is the divine process and science of the Gos- 
pel ... in substituting the love of Christ for the 
love of sin, in giving us an object to love, it meets 
our constitution and satisfies the strongest cravings 
of our nature."* 

'' We see from a consideration of this subject, that 
the want of love to God is the corrupt fountain from 
which all other sins, as so many streams, flow. The 
fii'st sin, and every other sin, have had their source 
in this defect. All evil actions, even the worst, ma}^ 
be traced up to this con'upt source. As the sum of 
obedience was love, so the germ of all sin is the 
defect of tliis holy principle. And where the defect 
is total, there is total depra^dty. From this subject 
Christians may learn how much iniquity still remains 
in their hearts. Just so far as you come shoii: of 
loving God with all the heart, soul, mind and 
strength, just so far are your hearts evil in the sight 

of God." t 

"And yet more, since we are creatures, endowed 

with will, and the power of choice, we never can be 
completely happy, unless we act as we choose; 
that is, unless we obey because we love to obey. 
Hence, fi'om the elements of our constitution, it is 
evident, we can be happy on no other principles 
than those of perfect obedience to God, and obedi- 
ence emanating from and pervaded by love." The 

* Thomas Gutlirie, D.D,, Presbyterian, 
f Archibald Alexander, D.D., Pres. 



26 A Key to True Religion. 

same author speaking of "The Moral Dignity of 
Missions" says: "Contemplate the benevolence of 
these means. In practice, the precepts of the Gospel 
may be summed up in the single command, ' Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
thy neighbor as thyself.' We expect to teach one 
man , obedience to this command, and that he will 
feel obhged to teach his neighbor, who will feel 
obliged to teach others, who are again to become 
teachers, until the whole world shall be peopled with 
one family of brethren. Animosity is to be done 
away, by inculcating universally the obligation of 
love."^' 

"Is there a word in any language invested with 
such attractiveness as love ? And this is Christiani- 
ty, whether objectively or subjectively viewed. The 
New Testament is adorned with its beauty and redo- 
lent with its fragrance. God is love. Christ is 
love. Heaven is love. So is religion, "f 

"Every thing tires but love. Prophecies fail, 
tongues cease, love alone is immortal. The mon- 
archy of Christ was founded upon the heart, upon 
love, and therefore with a consistency which is too 
profound to be accidental he had compassion upon 
all who trustfully invoked his power. . . . Two 
settled and unchangeable principles thus came up as 
including the idea of the church-love to Christ and 

*Francis Wayland, D.D., Baptist. 

f John Angel James, Congregational. • 



Corroborative Testimony of Men. 37 

love to man. T\Tioever has experienced this love is 
in Christ's Kingdom a living member ; he hath 
eternal hfe." * 

'' The all pmifying passion must, it is plain, be a 
passion for individuals. Let us imagine, then, a 
love for every human being. This answers the con- 
ditions of the problem to the extent, that he who 
loves everybody will of course ^viUingiy injure no- 
body, that is, will not commit sin. And if, leaving 
conjecture, we turn again to Christ's discourses, we 
find him, as it appears, mentioning this very passion 
as the essence of all legislation, or what we called 
above the law maldng power in man. The great 
commandment of the law, he says, is to love God 
with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself, 
and the maxim for practice corresponding to this 
law of feeling is ' Do unto others as you would that 
they should do to you.' " f 

"It is the design of Christianity to make of the 
human race one universal brotherhood ; and the 
solvent that is to fuse all walls of partition, the fire 
that is to melt all weapons of oppression, is the love 
of God. For^ this command^nent have we from Him 
that he icho loveth God^ loveth his hrother also. 
Loving thus, we shall fulfill all righteousness. The 
whole law of God is summed up in this, by Christ 
Himself, ' Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
thy heart and mth all thy soul, and with all thy 

* Ecce Deus. jfJScce Homo. 



28 A Key to True Religion. 

mind. This is the first and the great commandment. 
And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself.' That is to say, if we love 
God, we shall do all things else laid down by God's 
prophets. All good deeds will spring from this root, 
as the plant from the seed. There is one word, and 
but one, in which all the law is contained ; and that 
word is Zoi?^. " ^ 

'' This is the subject of the greatest importance, and 
should be well understood, as our Lord shows that 
the whole of true religion is comprised in thus lo^dng 
God and our neighber. . . . The love of our neigh- 
bor springs from the love of God as its source ; it is 
found in the love of God as its jprinci^le^ pattern 
a/nd end y' and the love of God is found in the love 
of our neighbor, as its efiect, representation and in- 
fallible mark. This love of our neighbor is a love 
of equity^ charity^ succor and henevolence. We owe 
to our neighbor what we have a right to expect from 
him. ' Do unto all men as you would they should 
do unto you,' is a positive command of our blessed 
Savior. By this rule, therefore, we should spealt^ 
thinlc and write^ concerning every soul of man; put 
the best construction upon all the words and actions 
of our neighbor that they can possibly bear. By 
this rule we are taught to bear with, love, and for- 
give him; to rejoice in his f eh city, mourn in his 
adversity, desire and dehght in his prosperity, and 

* John McClintock, D.D., Methodist Episcopal. 



Corrohorative Testimony of Men. 29 

promote it to the utmost of om' power; instruct his 
ignorance, help him in his weakness; and risk even 
our hfe for his sake, and for the pubhc good. In 
a word, we must do everything in our power, 
through all the possible varieties of circumstances for 
our neighbors, which we would wish them to do for 
us, were our stations reversed.^'' 

' 'This is the religion of Jesus ! How happy would 
society be, were these two plain, rational precepts 
properly observed ! Zove Me and love thy fellows! 
Be unutterably happy in Me, and be in perfect peace, 
unanimity, and love among yourselves. Great 
Fountain and Dispenser of love ! fill thy creation 
with this sacred principle, for His sake who died for 
the salvation of mankind !" "^ 

"What is rehgion then? It is easy to answer if 
we consult the oracles of God. According to these, 
it lies in one single point : it is neither more nor less 
than love : it is the love which is the fulfilling of the 
law, the end of the commandment. Religion is the 
love of God and our neighbor : that is, every man 
under heaven. This love, ruling the whole life, ani- 
mating all our tempers and passions, directing all our 
thoughts, words and actions, is ' pure religion and 
undefiled.' . . . By rehgion I mean the love of 
God and man filling the heart and governing the 
life. The sure efiect of this is, the uniform practice 
of justice, mercy and truth. This is the very 

* Adam Clark, D.D., LL.D. 



30 A Key to True Religion. 

essence of it; the height and depth of religion, 
detached from this or that opinion and from all par- 
ticular modes of worship." "^ 

In these quotations we have the testimony of 
Christians of many denominations widely differing 
in some respects, but concurring in what true religion 
is, and the manifest need of the world. We could 
go through the whole number of denominations if 
we had space in this volume, and give quotations 
from all of them as specifically teaching and as fully 
endorsing as these here given, that true religion is 
love to God and man. To the testimony of Chris- 
tians of different denominations we have added that 
of a champion skeptic and, also, that of a man of the 
world, whose name is fragrant with blessed memories 
to us all ; and they have only corroborated the testi- 
mony of the Churches and what thousands more, out- 
side of any denomination, would do here, could we 
give them space. It is but one expression of a 
universally felt want — an Object to love that shall 
satisfy the heart and regulate it in all of its relations. 
Pertinent to this Dr. Leonard W. Bacon says: 
*'Have you ever pondered that dark mystery of 
human nature, the origin of the frightful idolatries 
of India ? It seems to be proven that they have 
their beginning, not through development from some 
form of fetichism, baser and coarser still, but by 
deo:radation from the most refined and abstract 

*John Wesley. 



Corroborative Testimony of Men. 31 

speculations on the infinity, the spirituality and the 
immoi'tality of God : the fact is one that blocks the 
way of recent science in some of its most interesting 
tendencies. Ko subtler metaphysics is taught to-day 
in the lecture-rooms of Cambridge and New Haven 
than was taught long centuries ago by Hindoo 
savages, who enthroned their divinity in everlasting, 
impassive, repose, far be^^ond the reach of aflfection, 
sj^mpathy or prayer, until the needy millions cried 
out, stifling, famishing, ' Give us a God to love, to 
worship, to pray to !' and for lack of answer betook 
them to the forest, or the quarry, or the mine, to 
the carver, and the smith, and made them gods that 
were no gods. So little can argument of philosophy 
hold us back, you and me, at such a time as this, 
when the stress of life comes down upon us, and the 
cravings of the soul grow strong." 

Thus it is with much of "the metaphysical dis- 
quisitions and endless technicahties" ^ of not a few 
religious teachers, of the present day : they are 
sending many weary, sin-burdened and grief -stricken 
hearts away fi'om Him ^Yho is Love — away from 
Him who has sent His Son and commissioned His 
ministers to invite them to Him — away from Him 
Who only can lift their burdens and disperse their 
griefs — away from Him Who only can satisfy their 
souls — away from the Infinite Ocean of Blessedness 
into the cold and sterile region of philosophic and 

* Aspects of Christian Experience. 



A Key to True Religion. 



scientific investigation often so-called — ^into doubt, 
darkness and death. 

Man, constituted as he is, will love something, 
and his life ascends here into kindred felicities to 
heaven, or descends into kindred miseries to hell, 
according to the object on which he bestows supreme 
atifection. 

' 'The babe, nestling in its mother's breast, learns 
first of all to recognize the eye that beams on it with 
the truest, deepest love. The growing boy has not 
lost that first and purest feeling, before the early 
passion of the youth goes out to seek a home in 
some warm bosom palpitating with the same tender 
emotion. And when that dream is over, the mature 
man seeks in home and family a center of love — and 
wretched indeed, is he who does not find it there! 
And when the strife of life is nearly over, and other 
passions have been hushed to rest, the gray-haired 
sire pours out his heart anew upon the little 
prattlers that surround the hearth of his child- 
ren, and finds, in their fresh and undeceiving afiec- 
tion, a new well-spring of enjoyment, gushing up 
amid the arid desert of old age. " "^ But oh, what an 
inexhaustable Fountain of enjoyment — a well-spring, 
full, perennial and all-satisfying in Jesus Christ our 
Lord ! 



* Orville Dewey, D.D. 



CHAPTER in. 

THE SUBJECT ANALYTICALLY CONSIDERED. 

Truth stands investigation from whatever angle of 
vision it may be observed. In an anal3rtical consid- 
eration of the subject let us inquire — 

1. In which nature of ours does moral evil exist ? 
This is a vastly important question. It lies at the 
foundation of all correct notions of Christian life and 
the scheme for man's spiritual recovery, as the 
remedy must correspond with the nature of the 
disease. 

(1) Some say that sin has its source in the flesh — 
is a physical difficulty. 

If this be true, the remedy would be a symmetri- 
cal, healthful physical organism. Whatever relation 
the body may sustain to moral character and con- 
duct, if the assumption were true that sin emanates 
from the body, then the more robust, well developed 
and healthful would be the more morally upright 
and pious. But this is not true. The history of 
men and nations shows that lions in body have not 
unfrequently been lions in vice. If sin emanates 
from the flesh, how can we explain the well known 
fact that those who excel in physical vigor and 
development are inferior in virture to those less 
3 (33) 



M A Key to True Religion. 

robust? The antedeluvian world furnishes us a 
lesson m point here: "There were giants in the earth 
in those days ; and also after that, when the sons of 
God came in unto the daughters of men, and they 
bare children to them, the same became mighty men 
which were of old, men of renown. And God saw 
that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, 
and that every imagination of the thoughts of the 
heart was only evil continually." ^ 

Men's piety does not depend upon their health, 
nor do they necessarily become vicious as they 
become older and more feeble. This is seen in the 
observations of every day life, and the Psalmist 
expresses the experience of thousands in the words, 
'* Before I was afflicted, I went astray ; but now 
have I kept thy word." f 

There can be no explanation of this except sin 
emanate from a different region of our nature than 
the flesh. 

The body may be a medium of temptation and 
present occasion for sin; but the fact that the most 
heinous sins, such as anger, malice and murder are 
destitute of any sensuous impulse shows that the 
root of sin cannot be in it. Neither could we 
account for vice in devils, if it were true that its 
source is in the flesh, they being spirit, for "a spirit 
hath not flesh and bones. " :j: Christianity is not in- 
different to the body, but instructs us to put away 

*Gen. 6:4, 5. fPs. 119:67. tLuke24:39. 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 35 

all filthiness of the flesh,* and care for it as the 
temple of the Holy Ghost, f 

(2) If 5 as others say, sin is the result of ignorance, 
that it has its source in the intellect, then the remedy 
would be knowledge. An intellectual difficulty 
requires an intellectual remedy. This notion pre- 
vailed in the philosophies of the ancient Greeks and 
is entertained by skeptical thinkers of the present. 
To them the Gospel is foohshness for it presents a 
different remedy. 

If sin is an intellectual difficulty, then as men 
advance in intellectuality they become more virtu- 
ous. Unnumbered examples prove this false. 
Thousands of this class have been dissipated, licen- 
tious, covetous and cruel, and stars of the first intel- 
lectual magnitude have gone down into the quag- 
mu'es of moral degradation and ruin. ''It was an 
easy thing for Lord Byron to be a great poet ; it 
was merely indulging his nature ; he was an eagle, 
and must fly ; but to have cm^bed his willful 
humor, soothed his fretful discontent, and learned 
to behave like a reasonable being and a gentleman, 
that was a difficult matter, which he does not seem 
ever seriouly to have attempted." % 

Edgar A. Poe was a man of intelligence and 
poetical genius, but was dissipated and in many 
things unscrupulous. In all grades of intellectual 
rank there are men of a like character. The golden 

*Cor. 7: 1. t Cor. 6: 19. X Prof. Blackie's Self Culture. 



36 A Key to True Religion. 

age of Roman literature, art and science was an age 
of great moral darkness and sin. Under the ad- 
vanced state of intellectuality men gradually grew 
worse, and when ancient civilization had reached its 
culmination, men had fallen into the depths of moral 
degradation. If a want of intellectuality is the 
source of vice, how can we explain the great moral 
dissimilarity between persons of a like mental disci- 
pline ; or how sometimes the intellectually superior 
are the morally inferior ? It cannot be explained 
except on the supposition that sin is not the result 
of ignorance. 

Knowledge does not necessarily produce piety, 
"Because that, when they knew God, they glorified 
Him not as God, neither were thankful ; but be- 
came vain in their imaginations, and their foolish 
heart was darkened. " "^ 

Here is perhaps the mistake of thousands who 
profess the faith of Christianity. Because they have 
considerable knowledge of its teachings, recognize 
its divinity and are connected with some body of 
Christians, they esteem themselves pious, while their 
disposition and conduct contradict it every day. 
With all their intellectual attainments, even of theo- 
logy, their righteousness may not exceed the right- 
eousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, f 

One of the most radical errors on this line is given 
by Carlyle: " If the devil were passing through my 

* Romans 1 : 21. f Matthew 5 : 20. 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 37 

country, and he applied to me for any truth or fact 
of the universe, I should wish to give it to him. He 
is less a devil, knowing that three and three are six 
than if he didn't know it ; a light spark, though of 
the faintest, is in this fact ; if he knew facts enough, 
continuous light would dawn on him; he would (to 
his amazement) understand what the universe is, on 
what principles it conducts itself, and would cease 
to be a devil." According to this, if we could secure 
the devil a start in mathematical knowledge we 
should be encouraged to beheve that by further 
instruction in that science he would become a saint. 
The devil is not so circumscribed in his information 
of the afi'airs of the universe, but with it all he is the 
devil still. 

By this we do not mean that moral virtue and 
intellectual progress are enemies. Intellect has its 
better and more permanent stimulous under its 
influence. The Great Institutions of Learning, both 
in Europe and America, show the salutary effect of 
Christianity in the educational interests of men; and 
the original discoveries in science and the great 
explorations in the world, the relation Christianity 
sustains to the progress of thought and of civilization. 

The fact that the Creator has endowed us with 
intellectual faculties and surrounded us with vast 
resources of information, is evidence that He designs 
our progress in knowledge. 

A lack of intellectual culture may limit one's 



38 A Key to True Religion. 

influence, but cannot determine his moral character. 

If sin has its source, neither in the flesh nor intel- 
lect, then it must have it in — 

(3) The heart — the afiectional nature. 

This will appear more clearly in the further inves- 
tigation of the subject elsewhere in this work. 

We may here profitably observe that moral ac- 
countability is essential to the constitution of every 
created intelligence. It is a blessed revelation, that 
"God is love. " To create an intelligent being other- 
wise than with the power to love him would be 
contrary to the divine nature. Freedom of the 
moral power is essential to the existence of love. 
The power to love necessarily involves the power not 
to love. Coercive love is a contradiction of terms — 
it cannot be in the nature of the case. We behold 
man thus invested with this God-given freedom and 
moved by this highest motive. In the exercise 
of this freedom he went in opposition to truth, 
hence falsehood ; to virtue, hence vice. An essen- 
tial faculty moving toward a legitimate object may 
become sinful in moving in an illegitimate way, and 
the misuse of this essential power of every intelli- 
gence is the origin of sin among both angels and 
men — a self-imposed experiment at first, ending in 
an awful catastrophe. 

Let us inquire — 

2. What is Sin ? In its definition we shall see 
more clearly from which nature it springs. 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 39 

The Scriptures define sin to be " the transgi-ession 
of the law. " " This alone would give us but little 
light, but the Bible, as the Divine Revelation of 
spiritual things, must furnish us a complete explana- 
tion of so fundamental a question. 

The Divine Teacher tells us what "the law" is, 
and in His explanation of it we can see what sin is. 
It is given in answer to the Scribe's question : ' 'Which 
is the great commandment in the law ? " The an- 
swer: " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
thy heart, and with all thy soul, and vd\h all thy 
strength. This is the first and the great command- 
ment. The second is hke unto it: Love thy neigh- 
bor as thyself. Upon these two hang all the laia 
and the prophets. " f In the first He embraces all 
that is contained on the first table of the law — love 
to God; and in the second, all that is on the second 
table of the law — love to man. As a hook in the 
wall supported the manuscript of the law and the 
prophets, so upon the love of God and the neighbor 
hang both. St. Paul says : "Love is the fulfilling 
of the law":}: and when Christ adds, — "the pro- 
phets," He teaches that it is all the Gospel produces 
in character and conduct. • 

^Yhatever may be the requirement of the com- 
mandment, its essence is love. For instance : ' 'Thou 
shalt have no other gods before me — Thou shalt not 
take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," in an 

*lJolin3:4. f Matt. 22:40. t Rom. 13:10. 



40 A Key to True Religion. 

outer way, may seem to contain a spirit of tyranny; 
but a more careful observation will see in them true 
benevolence. Why not have any other gods before 
Him ? Why not take His name in vain ? Because 
we are to love Him. Take the second table: "Thou 
shalt not steal — Thou shalt not kill." Why? Be- 
cause we are to love our neighbor. If the law is 
love to God and man, and sin is " the transgression 
of the law," then sin as an act is the doing anything 
contrary to the love of God or man. In this we 
have a Scriptural, and, as we shall see, a philosophi- 
cal explanation of sin. 

3. What is a sinful state ? The state must cor- 
respond in character to sin as an act, and upon 
examination we find them "blood-kin" as parent 
and child. 

What is the state of heart from which sin springs ? 
It is Scripturally termed " the carnal mind," which 
St Paul instructs us, "is enmity against God — not 
subject to the law.^^^ When we remember that 
" God is love," that the law is a transcript of His 
mind, it is not difficult to see that the carnal mind 
is enmity against Him, is not subject to His law. 
The declaration, "Neither indeed can be" is as 
philosophical as it is biblical — enmity cannot har- 
monize with love — the one will destroy the other. 
Pertinent to this is the subject of moral depravity. 
Moral depravity does not consist in the destruction 

*Rom. 8:7. 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 41 

of any of the moral faculties any more than physical 
depravity is the destruction of any members of the 
body. Man has the same bodily structure Adam 
had in his primitive uprightness : head, trunk, upper 
and lower extremities. Intellectual depravity is 
not the extinction of any of the intellectual faculties; 
man has perception, reflection, memory, imagina- 
tion, and all, so far as we know, that existed in the 
the progenitor of the race. Now, does moral de- 
pravity consist in the destruction of any of the moral 
faculties? "Depravity" does not mean extinction, but 
is f onned of de Sindpravitas which signify crookedness^ 
jperverseness. As by physical depravity the body is 
enfeebled, subject to disease, decay and death ; and 
by intellectual depravity the intellect is enervated 
and turned from its proper channels of thought, so by 
moral depravity the afiectional nature is perverted. 
Total depravity, if it mean anything, signifies that 
body, soul and spirit are depraved; or, that inde- 
pendent of divine grace, man is wholly turned awa^^ 
from the true God. The terms, however, are so 
ambiguous that they should not be employed. 

Man's moral depravity is a state in which he be- 
comes more and more des^enerate and of which we 
see melancholy examples every day. But for 
di\dne helpfulness, he would grow Avorse without 
hope of recovery. 

It is said, " the whole head is sick and the whole 
heart is faint." From "the sole of the foot, even 



42 A Key to T^'ue Religion. 

unto the head, there is no soundness in it ; but 
wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. " But this 
does not disprove the entirety of man's being, — 
physical, intellectual and moral — though wounded, 
bruised and full of sores. These words, so frequently 
employed to prove certain notions of depravity, refer 
particularly to the corruption of the Jewish nation 
at the time they were given. They teach that the 
nation was corrupt from the people to the king. 
Man's moral degeneracy is very much as the failure 
of the mainspring in a clock and from which the 
clock sustains derangement of its parts. All the 
machinery is within, the dial plate and hands with- 
out; but it strikes at the wrong time, the hands 
point at the wrong figures, it gives false alarms 
and does not perform the purpose of its con- 
struction. Correct the mainspring and set it with 
the Sun, and it will keep time with the universe. 
The primary and principal moral difficulty with man 
is in the heart which afiects his entire being. Make 
the heart right, adjust it to the Son of Righteousness, 
and it will move in harmony with the skies. 

4. What are we to understand by moral virtue or 
lioliness? Having seen what its opposite is, we could 
briefly and clearly answer; but we think the subject 
will be brought out more fully to the mind by a 
more extended investigation of the question. A 
distinguished religious educator thinks it cannot be 
satisfactorily answered. He says : ' ' The question 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 4S 

here stated is, in what does virtue consist, what is 
its essence or the common quality in all virtuous 
action ? We have never fallen in with a satisfactory 
answer to this question in all its generahty. We sus- 
pect that a definition of virtue, taken absolutely, is be- 
yond the faculties of man. Price and Stewart repre- 
sent moral good as an original and simple quahty seen 
at once and intuitively by the mind, incapable of being 
reduced into an}i;hing more elementary, and, there- 
fore, incapable of definition. We suspect that this is 
the correct representation, so far as hitman intelli- 
gence is concerned. We make this quahfication, be- 
cause we do not mean to decide whether higher in- 
telUgencies might not be able to ^ on some quality 
or quahties as constituting the essence of the good. 
But of this we are not sure, that all attempted defini- 
tions of virtue on the part of ethical ^vriters have been 
utterly defective or consisted simply in the substitu- 
tion of synonymous phrases. When it is said that 
virtue is that which is good, right, meritorious, 
obhgatory, all such explanations amount to this, that 
virtue is virtue. " "^ 

If virtue is "an original and simple quality seen 
at once and intuitively by the mind," it is strange, 
indeed, that we can not find a word or words that shall 
clearly express it, so that there shall not cluster about 
it the obscurity of an unsolvable mystery. What is 
more perplexing — we are required to be virtuous 

* The Divine Government. 



44 A Key to True Religion. 

which is incapable of definition — beyond the power 
of human faculties to fix on a quality or qualities 
that we can call the essence of virtue. This is mani- 
festly incorrect from considerations already pre- 
sented. 

Virtue, signifying moral good, must express an 
experience or refer to the character of an act that 
other words can signify to the mind and remove 
doubt as to what is intended by it. It must mean 
the same everywhere in man, angel or God. We 
have seen what sin is as a state and an act which 
have their antipodes in virtue and a virtuous act. 

Referring to vicious acts the author of ' ' The Di- 
vine Government " says: ''They are vicious only so 
far as they are allowed by the will to flow out con- 
trary to the dictates of that law which God hath 
prescribed for the regulation of the conduct." Then 
they must be virtuous so far as they voluntarily flow 
out in harmony with the " the dictates of that law." 
We are not left in confusion about what the moral 
law of the universe is: virtuous acts are those of 
love to God which controls our feeling and conduct 
towards man. 

Would not a vicious or malicious act be sinful in 
its nature^ even were it possible to separate it from 
the voluntary principle — which we cannot do — and 
would not a benevolent act be virtuous thus, though 
it be not all-inclusive ? 

Pertinent to this subject, is the question: Wherein 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 45 

consists the holiness of God? In the admirable 
work titled, " The Right Way." * we have a well-de- 
fined view of the question. 

He says: '' It may be said that this matter is too 
high, and too deep for human intellect; and that to 
attempt investigation, however humbly and reverent- 
ly, is presumptuous. Still, it must be admitted that, 
in his own Word, hohness is ascribed to God ; and 
it becomes us, as grateful recipients of revelation, 
not to content ourselves with sounds without ideas, 
but to labor to comprehend what God has spoken. 
Every word is designed to convey a thought ; and 
though the idea conveyed may often fail to grasp 
the entire magnitude of the subject, yet it need 
never be self-contradicting, nor wholly confused. 
Let us then pause a moment, and ask humbly but 
earnestly, what our great Teacher would have us 
understand by the various passages of Holy Writ, 
wherein He claims that His nature is holy, and His 
acts right. 

" One theologian defines God's holiness to be ' the 
purity and rectitude of his nature;' but this merely 
substitutes other terms, which leave all as dark as 
ever. If it be said that He is holy because aU His 
acts accord perfectly with His divine nature, the 
reply may be made that the acts of all beings, so far 
as they are uninfluenced from without, are consist- 
ent with thek nature. If we say that sin is trans- 

*J. T. Crane, D.D. 



46 A Key to True Religion. 

gression of law, and that God is free from sin, we 
assert merely that Jehovah, has no superior whose 
laws He is bound to obey. If Satan with all his malig- 
nity, were the most powerful being in the universe, 
and consequently exalted above all law, and all con- 
trol, would holiness be an attribute of his character, as 
it is now of God's ? Would the laws which he might 
impose upon other beings be holy, just and right 
simply because they sprang from an omnipotent 
will ? It only requires statement to see its untruth- 
fulness and something of its revolting aspect. 

''The holiness of God, then, must be something 
more than an incidental result of His supremacy. It 
consists not in the fact that His acts are in harmony 
with His adorable nature ; since all uninfluenced 
action harmonizes with the nature of the actor, 
whether holy or unholy. If His laws are right be- 
cause omnipotence wiUs them, then the laws of an 
omnipotent ApoUyon would be right. After con- 
siderable reflection upon this interesting topic, the 
conclusion to which my mind tends is, that God is 
love; and His hohness consists in the fact that all 
the divine afiections are in accordance with the spirit 
of benevolence ; and all the divine acts, laws and 
plans, have for their object the accomplishment of 
good and the promotion of happiness. ... If 
these opinions be correct, the laws which God has 
given man are right, not because they are enforced 
by infinite power, but because they originate in 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 47 

infinite love, directed by infinite wisdom ; and true 
virtue is conformity of heart and life to the will of 
God. The really ^drtuous man is a ' partaker of the 
divine nature," 2 Pet. 1:4. In other words, genu- 
ine virtue is enlightened love, and ' love is the fulfill- 
ing of the law." ^ 

' ' Love is properly the image of God in the soul ; 
for ' God is love. ' By faith we receive from our 
Maker ; by hope we expect a future and eternal 
good; but by love we resemble God; and by it 
alone are we quahfied to enjoy heaven, and be one 
with Him throughout eternity. Faith and hope 
respect ourselves alone ; love takes in both God 
and man. Faith helps, and hope sustains us ; but 
love to God and man makes us obedient and use- 
ful, "t 

Hohness in man must be the same in kind as it is 
in God, and is easily understood when we take the 
simple statements of the Holy Scriptures. 

It may be said that it lacks the element of justice. 
What is justice but rendering to every man his due? 
T\Trat is the standard of justice but the moral law, 
and what is the moral law but the love of God and 
one's neighbor? " Justice is love leading us to give 
every one Ms due. " X 

In the administration of the divine government 
the very punishment inflicted upon the ofiender is, 
as God sees it, in benevolence to the sinner under 

* Pages 9-13. \ Clark's Theology. % The Divine Govern't. 



48 A Key to True Religion. 

the circumstances of his sinfulness, while it is instruc- 
tive and admonitory to the obedient. Could we see 
with clearer vision into the divine government, we 
would behold benevolence as truly manifest in the 
punishment of the wicked as in the comfort of the 
pious. Such is God's character that He cannot do 
a vicious or an unbenevolent thing and Infinite Wis- 
dom makes no mistakes. 



CHAPTER lY. 

THE SUBJECT ANALYTICALLY CONSIDEKED. (Coilt'd). 

To EEACH one plane of light gains vantage ground 
for reaching another, and as we advance clouds dis- 
appear before the increasing sunshine of a broader 
discovery of truth. The full round orb of the 
Christian System shall yet shine clearly to all who 
will look at it and that without intervening mists of 
uncertainties. 

Other evidences of the truthfulness of the position 
assumed will appear from the facts — 

1. That as men recede from God, and consequent- 
ly become more and more depraved, they lose the 
more distinct ideas of God and love and also the very 
words that express them. 

Archbishop Trench in his suggestive work on 
" The Study of Words," says, " When wholly let- 
ting go the truth, when long and greatly sinning 
against hght and conscience, a people has thus gone 
the downward way, has been scattered off by some 
violent catastrophe from those regions of the world 
which are the seats of advance and progress, and 
driven to its remote isles and further corners, then 
as one nobler thought, one spiritual idea after an- 
other has perished from it, the words also that 
4 (49) 



50 A Key to True Religion. 

expressed these have perished too. As one habit of 
civilization has been let go after another, the words 
which those habits demanded have dropped as well, 
first out of use, and then out of memory, and thus 
after awhile have been wholly lost. 

' ' Moffat, in his ' Missionary Labors and Scenes 
in South Africa,' gives us a very remarkable ex- 
ample of the disappearance of one of the most sig- 
nificant words from the language of a tribe sink- 
ing ever deeper in savagery ; and with the dis- 
appearing of the word, of course, the disappearing 
as well of the great spiritual fact and truth where- 
of the word was at once the vehicle and the 
guardian. The Bechuanas, a Cafire tribe, employed 
formerly the word ' Merino ' to designate ' Him 
that is above,' or ' Him that is in heaven,' and at- 
tached to the word the notion of a Supreme Di- 
vine Being. This word, with the spiritual idea 
corresponding to it, Moffat found to have vanished 
from the language of the present generations, al- 
though here and there he would meet with an old 
man, scarcely one or two in a thousand, who re- 
membered in his youth to have heard of ' Merino ;' 
and this word, once so deeply significant only sur- 
vived now in the spells and charms of the so-called 
rain-makers and sorcerers, who misused it to desig- 
nate a fabulous ghost, of whom they told the absur- 
dest and most contradictory things. . . . 

''Dobrizhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, in his curious 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 51 

^History of the Abipones,' tells us that neither these 
nor the Guarinies, two of the principal native tribes 
of Brazil, possessed any word in the least corespond- 
ing to our ' thanks. ' But what wonder, if the feel- 
ing of gratitude was entirely absent from their 
hearts, that they should not have possessed the 
corresponding word in their vocabularies? Nay, 
how should they have had it there ? And that in 
this absence lies the true explanation, is plain from a 
fact which the same writer records, that, although 
inveterate askers, they never showed the slightest 
sense of obligation or of gratitude when they ob- 
tained what they sought ; never saying more than, 
' This will be useful to me,' or, ' This is what I 
wanted.' 

"Dr. Knapp, after laborious researches in some 
widely extended dialects of East Africa, has remarked 
in them the same absence of any words expressing 
the idea of gratitude. 

"Nor is it only in what they have forfeited and 
lost, but also in what they have retained or invented, 
that these languages proclaim their degradation and 
abasement, and how deeply they and those that 
speak them have fallen. For indeed the strange 
wealth and the strange poverty, I know not which 
is the strongest and the saddest, of the languages of 
savage tribes, rich in words which proclaim their 
shame, poor in those which should attest the work- 
ings of any nobler life among them, not seldom 



52 A Key to True Beligion. 

absolutely destitute of these last, is a mournful and 
ever-recurring surprise, even to those who were 
in part prepared to expect nothing else. Thus I 
have read of a tribe in New Holland, which has no 
word to signify God, but has one to designate a 
process by which an unborn child may be destroyed 
in the womb of its mother. And I have been in- 
formed, on the authority of one excellently capable 
of knowing, an English scholar of long residence in 
Van Dieman's Land, that in the native language of 
that island there are four words to express the tak- 
ing of human life — one to express a father's kilhng 
of a son, another, a son's killing of a father, with 
other varieties of murder ; and in no one of these 
lies the slightest reprobation, or sense of the deep- 
lying distinction between to ' kill ' and to ' murder;' 
while at the same time, of that language so richly 
and so fearfully provided with expressions for this 
extreme utterance of hate, he also reports that a 
word for ' love ' is wanting in it altogether. . . . 

''But has man fallen, and deeply fallen, from the 
heights of his original creation ? We need no more 
than his language to prove it. Like everything else 
about him, it bears at once the stamp of his great- 
ness and of his degradation, of his glory and of his 
shame. What dark and sombre threads he must 
have woven into the tissue of his hfe, before we 
could trace those threads of darkness which run 
through the tissue of his language ? What facts of 



Tlie Subject Analytically Considered. 53 

wickedness and woe must have existed in the one, 
ere such words could exist to desifiriiate these as are 
found in the other. They have never wanted those 
who would make light of the hurts which man has 
inflicted on himself, of the sickness with which he is 
sick ; who would persuade themselves and others 
that morahsts and divines, if they have not quite 
invented yet enomionsly exasperated these. But 
are statements to this effect found only in Scripture 
and in Sermons? Ai-e not mournful corroborations 
of their truth imprinted deeply upon every province 
of man's natural and spiritual hf e, and on none more 
deeply than on his language ? It needs but to open 
a dictionary, and cast our eye thoughtfully down a 
few columns, and we shall find abundant confirma- 
tions of this sadder and sterner estimate of man's 
moral and spiritual condition. How else shall we 
explain the catalogue of words, having all to do with 
sin or ^vith sorrow, or with both ? How came they 
there ? AYe may be quite sure that they were not 
invented without being needed and they have each a 
correlative in the world of reahties." * It is a well- 
known fact that the New Testament writers were 
compelled to coin a word unknown in classic litera- 
ture in order to express the true idea of love in 
Pagan languages. However capable the Greek of 
expressing the grandest conceptions and the finest 
distinctions of intellect, it had no word to express 

* Trencli on "Words. 



54 A Key to Trne Beligion. 

the New Testament idea of love. Then another 
embarrassment was met in translating the Greek 
New Testament into an other Pagan language, the 
Latin. " We might call it one of the misfortunes 
of our English version that the Greek word for love, 
ayaTVT] has been translated charity. But it is rather 
the fault of the language itself than of the transla- 
tors. When St. Jerome came to translate this part 
of the New Testament he could find no word in the 
Latin language which would properly fit the true 
Christian idea of divine love. Paganism had not the 
word, because Paganism had never possessed the 
idea. The word mnor came most near, but that had 
degrading associations. He selected the Latin 
caritas^ signifying dearness^ which has been used in 
most of the translations of modern Europe. But 
this word becoming charity in English, has sunk to 
mean mere almsgiving, or favorable construction of 
other's actions, as when we say charitable opinion. " * 

This clearly shows that the state of moral depravity 
is in the afiectional nature ; that as men recede from 
God they become more and more possessed of hatred, 
sink deeper and deeper into savagery, and that a state 
of vice is a state of hate, and a state of holiness is a 
state of love. 

2. The relation of the Moral Law to Man's Ex- 
perience. The law whenever or wherever given, 
whether with greater or less verbal form, is a trans- 

*Whedon. 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 55 

cript of the divine mind ; the heart was in the image 
of God, hence there was a complete correspondence 
between them : God, love ; the Law, love ; the 
heart, love. 

When this was man's experience, the divine 
government respecting him was not from without, 
but from within. He withdrew his heart from God, 
and as a planet that has lost its centripetal force, he 
moved from the true orbit of hfe and thereby 
wrought his own ruin. Then the government be- 
came from loithout. 

Having lost the Law out of his heart, it became 
necessary to write it as it appears in the form pre- 
sented on Sinai. In the uncreated love dwelling in 
the bosom of the infinite Father, provisions were 
made to restore man in loyalty to God. 

During the Patriarchal age He gave the people in- 
struction through angels, visions and other means, 
and finally in the permanent form of the Ten Com- 
mandments, that the Law might be frequently read 
and possibly restored to their hearts. 

Most nations and men, if not all, to a greater or 
less degree, have to receive the law first in its verbal 
form with its appropriate penalties before they can 
come into its enjoyment through grace. Thus it 
came to the Israelites. Behold it as it came at that 
old rock-ribed and thunder-riven mountain ! " The 
dechvities of Sinai were hidden by the thousands 
who had gathered to the spot. Expectation and 



56 A Key to True Religion. 

trembling awe filled each heart, as they lifted their 
eyes to the dark and barren crags which hung far 
above their heads. Their leader had often brought, 
them messages from the unseen Jehovah ; but to- 
day, the Invisible was to address them in person. 
Already there were tokens of his coming. A cloud 
of pitchy darkness enshrouded the summit of the 
mountain, and a dense smoke went up ' as the smoke 
of a furnace. ' Quivering tongues of fire shot forth ; 
thunder rolled its mighty voice through the skies, 
and echoed down the deep mountain gorges ; and 
the mount itself ' quaked exceedingly. ' And 
then there came a trumpet-blast, sounding long, 
and waxing louder, and still louder, till valley and 
hill rung with the echo. Moses spake, and ' God 
answered him with a voice. ' That voice proclaimed 
the divine law in the ears of Israel's tribes. But 
the sounds that conveyed the will of God to them, 
filled their hearts with dismay and terror. The 
clowdy darkness, lighted up only by the lurid flash 
of the hghtning, the reverberating thunders, the 
trembling mountain, all conspired to terrify the 
beholders. And as the law was proclaimed amid 
this awful scene, as commandment after command- 
ment, uttered from the cloud, came rolling down 
from above, and broke upon their astonished ears, 
the terror-stricken multitude began to recede from 
the mount, and at last they stood afar ofi"; and 
with white lips they said to the interpreter of 



Tlie Subject Analytically Considered. 57 

Jehovah, ' Speak tlwii T\4th us, and we will hear ; 
but let not God speak with us, lest we die." * 

Thus, in some degree it comes to all men. One 
writes: "Frightful accounts of cruelty, butchery 
and cannibahsm fi^equently reached the station, or 
came under the actual observation of the mission- 
aries, some pro\dng that, as much as they had heard, 
the half of Fiji's horrors had not been told." 
Theirs was a state of terrible moral degredation, 
but the teaching and conduct of the missionaries 
sti'uck them at first with fear and alarm. Mr. Hunt, 
the missionary, says : " The people at Lakeml:>a say 
that their god has actually left the island, because 
om- God has beaten him till his bones are sore ! The 
people are really afraid for the safety of their gods, 
and some of them have an idea that Christianity will 
prevail." f The God whom they feared, they 
learned to love, and to-day, the religion they, in their 
ignorance, were afraid would prevail, is their joy and 
their salvation. 

The law is only terrif}dng at first because of the 
antagonism of the heart and not because of any lack 
of benevolence in it — ' ' the law is srood. "i ' ' Bv the 
law is the knowledge of sin " || is explanatory — it is 
revealing. God is the Supreme Ruler of the Uni- 
verse. His government extends not only over the 
material world but over every intelligence in heaven, 

*Tlie Right Way. f Among the Canibals. % Tim. 1: 8. 
II Rom. 7:7. 



58 A Key to True Rdigion. 

earth and hell. He governs the vegetable world to 
some degree differently from the merely inanimate ; 
the animal from the vegetable ; and man from the 
animal, because of a difference in nature. The 
fitness of this is observed in that man possesses a 
nature that feels moral distinction, is thereby capa- 
ble of moral government and is consequently ad- 
dressed with motives to influence his action. If he 
will not be governed from within, he must be gov- 
erned from without. This shows the relation of the 
saved and the unsaved to God — the one, delighting 
to do his will ; the other, by outer restraint, feeling 
continual antagonism. The difference of divine 
relation does not originate in a want of divine love 
toward any, but a moral necessity arising from a 
difference in the character and conduct of. men. God 
is no respecter of persons but he is of character. 
After the law was given at Sinai, God said : " These 
words which I command thee this day shall be in 
thine heart. " ^ The prophet declares: ''But this 
shall be the covenant that I will make with the house 
of Israel: After those days, saith the Lord, I will 
put my law in their inward parts, and wiite it in 
their hearts. " f 

Here one of the Annual Feasts of the Jews has 
pecuKar significancy — The Pentecost. It was insti- 
tuted in commemoration of the giving of the Law at 
Sinai which was fifty days after the Passover. True, 

* Deut. 6:9. t Jeremicah 31 : 33. 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 5^ 

it marked the second or wheat harvest, but not that 
only. "That it also commemorated the giving of 
the Law on Mount Sinai is not indeed said ex- 
pressly in the Scriptures, and so is doubted by many 
biblical scholars ; but we join with those who hold 
it as true: (a) because it was historically a fact that 
seven weeks did occur from the leaving of Egypt to 
the giving of the Law on Sinai ; (b) because some 
of the most eminent Jewish commentators so held ; 
(c) because the analogy of the other great feasts 
requires a historical reference; and (d) because of the 
striking correspondence, yet contrast, between the 
giving of the Old Law by Moses and the giving of 
the New Law by Christ. The last day of the seven 
weeks, says Grotius, was the day of the given Law 
as inferred from Ex. 20: 1, 2, and was called on this 
account, ^^^ m^JJl— The Feast of the Law." * 

As the Israel of old were assembled to receive the 
written Law; so the Israel of Christ were assembled 
to receive the law in its essence, (not New Law); 
the former event occurred on Mount Sinai ; the 
latter, on Mount Zion, in an upper room. " At the 
one, the mountain trembled with a shaking of the 
earth ; at the other, the house of the apostles. At 
the former, amid fiery flames and flashing lightning, 
there sounded a whirl of winds and a crash of 
thunders ; at the latter, together with a sight of 
fiery tongues, there came a sound from heaven as of 

* Whedon on Acts 3:1. 



60 A Key to True Beligion. 

a rushing wind. In the former, the blast of clarion 
uttered the words of the Law ; at the latter, the 
Gospel trumpet sounded forth from the mouth of 
the apostles. " ^ The Israel of old were prepared for 
the reception of the Law in the form of the Ten 
Commandments ; the Israel of Christ tarried at 
Jerusalem * ' in prayer and supplication " until the 
Law in its essence filled their hearts. Moses as- 
cended the Mount to receive the Law on tables of 
stone for the hosts of Israel ; Jesus ascended upon 
high that it might be written on ' ' the fleshy tables 
of the hearts of the people." f " The love of God 
is shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost that 
is given unto us. " 

It is certainly more than a co-incidence that on the 
i)ery day commsinorative of giving the Law as 
written^ fifty days after the ofiering of our Great 
Passover, the very essence of that Law was fully 
established in the hearts of the believers. % It was 
the fulfillment of a prophecy, and the beginning of 
the fullness of grace. 

St. Paul says: ''For as much as ye are mani- 
festly declared to be the epistle of Christ manifested 
by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of 
the living God; not on tables of stone, but in fleshy 
tables of the heart. "|| He here makes reference to 
the Law written of God on the tables of stone and 
delivered to the people by Moses, and draws an 

* St. Jerome. f2 Cor. 3:3. t Rom. 5:5. |1 2 Cor. 3:3. 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 61 

analogy between the writing of the Spirit, through 
his preaching, on the hearts of the Corinthian breth- 
ren. In former times a measure of this experience 
was given to God's people and fully perhaps to the 
prophets and others. Now "the love of God," or 
law, "is shed abroad in the heart ^^ not only of 
prophets, but of all who will accept it — a peculiar 
privilege since the day of Pentecost. 

3. The Meaning of Spiritual Death and Spiritual 
Life. 

(1) What is Spiritual Death ? When a man is 
said to be spiritually dead, what thought do we 
intend to convey ? We are instructed, " to be car- 
nally minded is death." ^ Here we learn that 
carnally mindedness and spiritual death are identical: 
a satisfactory explanation of one must be a satisfac- 
tory explanation of the other. Revelation gives it: 
" The carnal mind is enmity against God — not sub- 
ject to His Law." Then spiritual death must be a 
state of ' 'enmity against God" — a state of hatred. So, 
" He that loveth not his brother ahideth in deaths f 
Another aspect of this subject is given by St. John: % 
" Whosever hateth his brother is a mmxlerer" — 
that is, he has the same spirit in kind it may be 
different in degree. It is not unfrequently said of 
a gentleman, "He is a good fellow but has a 
bad disposition." This was the difficulty with Cain. 
Hate is the same in kind, only different in degree, 

* Rom. 8:6. flJolin3:15. tlJolin3:15. 



63 A Key to True Religion. 

with eternal death. '' Whosoever hateth his brother 
is a murderer ; and ye know that no murderer hath 
eternal life abiding in him . . . but abideth in 
death."* 

(2) What is spiritual life ? When one is said to 
be spiritual, what is meant ? The former definition 
enables us to answer this question easily. If 
spiritual death is "enmity against God and the 
neighbor," spiritual life must be the love of God and 
one's neighbor. '' And the Lord thy God will cir- 
cumcise thine heart and the heart of thy seed, to love 
the Lord thy God . . . that thou may est live.'^^ •[ 
The change in their hearts was not to produce 
natural or intellectual life — this they had — ^but spirit- 
ual life which is shown in the words to mean the 
love of God. The nature of spiritual life is also 
shown in the declaration that "we know we have 
passed from death into life, because we love the 
brethren." :{: 

a. This life is the same in kind with the heavenly 
life. 

(a.) This is evidently the teaching of the Holy 
Scriptures. 

' ' He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting 
Hfe" II — in kind. To believe properly on the Lord, 
brings the experience of the new-birth, which the 
Scriptures teach, is the same as spiritual life. 

*lJohn3:14, 15. fDeut. 30:6. tlJolin3:14. 

II John 3:38. 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 63 

^'AYhosoever belie veth that Jesus is the Christ is 
born of God ; and every one that loveth Him that 
begot, loveth him also that is begotten of Him."^ . . 
Beloved, let us love one another ; for love is of God, 
and every one that loveth is horn of God. " f Then 
to beheve on the Lord, is to be born again, which is 
the expeiience of Divine love, which is spiritual life, 
which is eternal life — ''he thatbelieveth . . .hath 
eternal life. " 

This is in harmony with the fact that we are not 
saved by what we do, but by what we are or be- 
come. The subject of salvation is often confounded 
with that of reward. Our salvation is by grace 
through faith which produces a moral fitness in us 
for heaven; we are rewarded according to our works. 
Hence, " Every man's work shall be manifest: for 
the day shall declare it, because it shall try every 
man's work of what sort it is. If any man's work 
ahide^ which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive 
a reward. If any man's work shall be burned, ho 
shall sufier loss ; but he himself shall be saved, yet 
as by fire." % Then, while a man may be saved, ho 
shall sustain loss in his reward, if his works aro 
burned. The following are a few of the proof texts: 
''For by grace are j^e saved through faith . . . not 
by works, lest any man should boast. || . . . AYho 
hath saved us^ and called us with a holy calUng, not 
according to ov/r worhs^ but according to His oxon 

*lJohn5:l. flJolin4:7. tl Cor. 3: 13-15. iEph.2:8,9. 



64 A Key to True Religion. 

purpose and grace. . . . For the Son of man shall 
come in the glory of the Father and with His angels ; 
and then He shall reward every man according to 
his works. " ^ In each reference to salvation, it is 
declared to be by grace ; in each reference to rewards, 
it is according to works. This principle is taught 
in Natm^e as truly as in Revelation ; a law of the 
material universe is the adaptation of the inhabitant 
by his physical structure to the planet or place on 
which he lives. The foliage and fibre of plants, the 
plumage of birds and the coats of animals near the 
equator difier from those in colder regions. Thus in 
the spiritual world every soul gravitates to the place 
for which it is fitted — the place indicated by its 
moral character. When Judas hanged himself, it is 
said: "he went to his own place- 'f — ^the one for 
which he had prepared himself. When a saint dies 
he goes to the place prepared for them that love God. 

That spiritual life is the same in kind with eternal 
life may be seen. 

h. In the character of the heavenly society. 

(a.) ''God is love" is the blessed revelation He 
makes of Himself. 

Neither men nor angels can tell the profound 
depth, the sublime height, the immeasurable dura- 
tion, of His love. They may reject it and ruin 
themselves but that would not destroy His love, any 
more than an intervening cloud would destroy the 

*2Tim. 1:9. f Acts 1:25. 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 65 

light of the Sun. It is said that God is angry with 
the wicked every day, but it is rather the opposition of 
good against evil, of holiness against sin, than any 
feeling of animosity toward man. God can have no 
motive of malevolence. It cannot be more desir- 
able than benevolence. He cannot feel it necessary 
to crush a mighty rival, nor to obtain any good. 
Man experiences a Divine antagonism only because 
his own heart is alienated from God, and he fills the 
outer restraints of the Divine government. As the 
opposition to evil is most intense in the most holy 
nature, it must be infinite in God. How completely 
this harmonizes with the unfolded character of Deity ! 
Though we may hide ourselves from the beams of 
the Sun, yet he shines on for aU who will bathe in his 
light. *'The Sun does not shine for a few trees and 
flowers, but for the wide world's joy. The lonely 
pine on the mountain top waves its sombre boughs, 
and cries, ' Thou art my Sun ! ' And the little 
meadow violet lifts its cup of blue, and whispers 
with its perfumed breath, ' Thou art my Sun! ' And 
the grain in a thousand fields rustles in the wind and 
makes answer, ' Thou art my Sun! ' So God sits, 
efiulgent in Heaven, not for a favored few, but for 
the universe of Mf e ; and there is no creature so poor 
or so low that he may not look up with childhood 
confidence and say, ' My Father, thou art mine. " * 

*H. W. Beeclier. 
5 



66 A Key to True Beligion. 

(b) Love is the character of the unfallen angels. 
How could it be otherwise when their nature has 

never been stained by sin ? Their conduct has never 
varied from the divine pleasure — never bathed in 
any other ocean than divine love. Whether they 
appear in the presence of the Almighty and with 
veiled faces cry : '' Holy, holy, holy. Lord of hosts, 
the whole earth is full of the glory; " or borne on 
wings etherial, to minister comfort and strength to 
the inhabitants of earth, or to those of more distant 
worlds, their every impulse is love. 

(c) Love is the joyful experience of aU the re- 
deemed in heaven. Though they have all sinned, 
their sins are forgiven ; though their hearts were 
once sinful, their sinfulness has all been purged 
away by the influence of the Cross and the power of 
the Holy Spirit. They are " partakers of the divine 
nature," and as they are now thrilled with the divine 
presence and filled with divine glory, their songs tell 
of their character; '' Unto Him that loved us cmd has 
washed us in His hlood from our sins?^ * 

If God is love, and the angels — rank above rank 
— and the redeemed in glory, are ever moved by this 
heavenly life, then it is the experience necessary for 
heavenly society. One of our h3minist says : 

" Beyond this veil of tears 

There is a life above, 
Unmeasured by the flight of years 
And all that life is love," f 

* Rev. 1:5. f Montgomery. 



The Subject Analytically Considered. 67 

The Christian has, then, the same in substance, 
only diflferent in intensity, the life enjoyed in the 
heavenly world. 

There is much truth in the old stanza : 

"'Tis a heaven below, 

My Redeemer to know; 
And the angels could do nothing more 

Than to fall at his feet, and the story repeat, 
And the lover of sinners adore." 

"Prophecies, tongues, knowledge, are all pro- 
visional and partial — soon to be merged into the per- 
fect and universal — ^but love is eternal. " * 

Every candidate for heaven should pray: 

"Thy nature, gracious Lord, impart; 

Come quickly from above ; 
Write thy new name upon my heart, 

Thy new best name of love." f 

In its enjoyment we drink of a stream of pleasure 
that never runs dry, and shall have a home where 
every heart shall be love, every intellect shall be 
light, every conscience be peace, and all blessings 
break upon the shores of hearts that have been 
crushed, like summer waves upon the sands of a 
peaceful sea, chiming in songs of gratitude unbroken 
and undisturbed forever and ever. 

*Whedon. f Wesley. 



CHAPTER y. 

THE TESTIMONY OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 

''A TRAVELER relates, that he embarked on a 
stream one beautiful evening, but towards morning 
a dense fog enveloped them. No observations could 
be made, and the vessel was directed by the com- 
pass alone. They were in the fog on a dangerous 
coast, and dared not proceed. A consultation of 
officers decided to head the ship seaward, saiKng by 
the compass. Then they changed the course, and 
in an hour heard a fog-bell, passed within a stone's 
throw of a ledge of rocks, which they recognized, 
and soon reached safely ' the desired haven. ' What 
the compass is to the mariner, the Bible is to man- 
kind."* 

It is a compass that has given safe direction to 
many a tempest-tossed and storm-driven mariner. 
The weight of opposition it has sustained while it 
has continued to enlighten and purify individual and 
national life, prove that it contains all that is neces- 
sary for both our faith and practice. It being the 
Divine Revelation of Spiritual Things, its teachings 
must be the final in all questions of morality and 
human salvation. It reveals that the purpose of 



(68) 



The Testimony of the Holy Scriptures. 69 

Heaven in the redemption of man, is to restore him 
to the love of Grod ; a lack of which is his moral 
ruin ; its enjoyment, his salvation and glor}^ forever. 
This is observed in the fact that — 
1. It requires us to love God and man. 
" Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou 
shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any 
likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that 
is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under 
the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to 
them, nor serve them ; for I the Lord thy God am 
a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers 
upon the children unto the third and fourth genera- 
tion of them that hate me ; and showing mercy unto 
thousands of them that love me, and keep my com- 
mandments * — The Lord yom' God proveth you, to 
know whether ye love the Lord your God with all 
your heart, and with all your soul f — My son, give 
me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways X 
— Take good heed therefore unto yourselves, that 
you love the Lord your God || — Hear, O Israel : 
The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love 
the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all 
thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy 
strength, this is the first commandment. And the 
second is like, namely this. Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself. There is none other command- 
ment greater than these. And the Scribe said unto 

* Ex. 20 : 3-6. f Deut. 13 : 3. X Prov. 23 : 26. \\ Joshua 23 : 11. 



70 A Key to True Religion. 

him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for 
there is one God ; and there is none other but He: 
And to love Him with all the heart, and with all 
the understanding, and with all the soul, and with 
all the strength, and to love his neighbor as himself, 
is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. 
And when Jesus saw that he answered discretely, 
he said unto him. Thou art not far from the king- 
dom of God * — Owe no man anything, but to love 
one another, for he that loveth another hath fulfilled 
the Law. If there be any other commandment, it 
is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, 
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Love 
worketh no iU to his neighbor ; therefore love is the 
fulfilling of the lawf — If ye fulfill the royal law 
according to the Scripture, Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself, ye do well :j: — Let us love one 
another : for love is of God ; and every one that 
loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. If God 
so loved us, we ought also love one another. If ye 
love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love 
is perfected in us. If any man say, I love God, 
and hateth his brother, he is a liar ; for he that 
loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can 
he love God whom he hath not seen? And this 
commandment have we from him, That he who 
loveth God love his brother also || — As ye would 

*Mark 13: 29-34. f Rom. 13: 8-10. . . % James 2: 8. 

|llJohn4:7, 11, 12, 20,21. 



The Testimony of the Holy Scriptures. 71 

that men should do to you, do ye also to them like- 
wise. If ye love them which love you, what thanks 
have ye ? for sinners also love those that love them. 
And if 3^e do good to them which do good to 3'ou, 
what thank have ye ? for sinners also do even the 
same. And if, ye lend to them of whom ye hope to 
receive, what thank have ye ! for sinners also lend 
to sinners, to receive so much again. But love your 
enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing 
again ; and your reward shall be gi-eat, and ye shall 
be the children of the highest: for He is kind unto 
the unthankful and to the evil'' — * 

There are many texts which refer to this experi- 
ence in a general way, a few of which are: "Ye 
tithe mint and rue, and all manner of herbs, and 
pass over judgment and the love of God: these 
ought ye to have done, and, not leave the other un- 
done f — Love is strong as death ; jealously is cruel 
as the gi'ave ; the coals thereof are coals of fii'e, 
which hath a most vehement flame. ]Many waters 
cannot quench love neither can the floods drown it : 
if a man would give all the substance of his house 
for love, it would utterly be condemned.":!: The 
13th Chapter of 1st Corinthians gives a very clear de- 
claration of the indespensibleness of this experience. 
"The chapter has three distinct stages, or para- 
gi'aphs. The jirst declares, with intense h}^erbole, 
the absolute nothingness of every virtue if love be 

* Luke 6:31-35. tLukell:42. t Songs 8: 6, 7. 



72 A Key to True Religion. 

wanting, (1-3); the second draws a brief, beautiful 
picture of love in actual life, (4-8) ; the third (8-13) 
traces our progress through transient developments, 
in contrast with the abiding three graces, faith, hope 
and love. " ^ 

The Revised New Testament substitutes the word 
love for charity in the quotation following: "If I 
speak with the tongues of men and of angels but 
have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a 
clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, 
and know all mysteries and all knowledge ; and if I 
have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have 
not love, I am nothing. And if I bestow all my 
goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be 
burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing. " f 
'' The central gift of Christianity — not transient but 
permanent — the diamond excellence of which all 
other virtues are a phase — is Love. And to rouse 
his Corinthian brethren above their eagerness after 
the transient, the apostle tasks all his powers to pre- 
sent the diamond before their eyes in its most attrac- 
tive brilliancy. All critics view this passage as one 
of Paul's genuine gems. It has something of the 
rythm, as well as the splendor, of poetry. But it is 
brief and condensed, and not one word is inserted 
for mere fine writing, for Paul does not one moment 
forget his argument; the object of which is, to im- 
press his brethren that one virtue within the reach 

*Wliedon. fl Cor. 13:1-3. 



The Testimony of the Holy Scriptures 73 

of all, the pennanent heritage of the Church, is di- 
vine love. . . . Dr. Hodge says, the Greek word 
occurs one hundred and sixteen times in the New 
Testament, and is translated lo^^e in all cases but 
twenty-three, and its translation in those passages is 
arbitrary.""^ These references are sufficient to 
prove conclusi^^ely from the Scriptures, that, what- 
ever endowments we may possess, or deeds we may 
perform without love^ they weigh nothing in the 
balances of heaven concerning our salvation. 

2. That di\dne acceptance and blessing depend 
upon our love to God. 

" He keepeth covenant and mercy with them that 
love Him and keep His commandments f — Because 
he hath set his love upon Me, therefore will I deliver 
him : I will set him on high, because he hath known 
My name X — The Lord preser^^eth all those that love 
Him II — The sons of the stranger, that join them- 
selves to the Lord, to serve Him, and to love the 
name of the Lord, to be His servants. Even them 
will I bring to jMy holy mountain, and make them 
joyful in My house of prayer § — If ye love Me keep 
My commandments. He that hath My command- 
ments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me; 
and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, 
and I will love him, and will manifest Myself to him. 
If a man love Me, he will keep My words : and My 

* Commentary, fDeut. 7:9. ^Ps. 91:14. |lPs. 145:20. 
§Isa. 56:6. 



74 A Key to True Beligion. 

Father will love him, and We will come unto him, 
and make Our abode with him * — We know that all 
things work together for good to them that love 
God f — Grace be with all them that love our Lord 
Jesus Christ in sincerity X — Her sins, which are 
many, are forgiven; for she loved much ; but to 
whom Httle is forgiven, the same loveth httle" || 

3. That a lack of love to God or to the neighbor 
is our condemnation. 

''I have somewhat against thee because thou hast 
left thy first love § — ^Who so hath this world's good 
and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his 
bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the 
love of God in him ? a — And then shall the wicked 
be revealed, whom the X/ord shall consume with the 
spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the bright- 
ness of His coming; even him, whose coming is after 
the working of Satan with all power and signs and 
lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unright- 
eousness in them that perish; because they received 
not the love of the truth^ that they might be saved J 
— If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let 
him be Anathema Maranatha c — Be not hasty in the 
spirit to be angry; for anger resteth in the bosom 
of io6\s>d — Make no friendship with an angry man; 
and with a furious man thou shalt not go." e 

* John 14: 15, 31, 23. f Rom. 8: 28. tEph. 6:24. || Luke 7:47. 
§ Rev. 3:15. ^lJohn3:17. 5 Eph. 2:8-10. cl Cor. 16:22. 
dEccl. 7:9. eProv. 22:24. 



The Testimony of the Holy Scriptures. 75 

4. That is the experience that has the promise of 
the heavenly inheritance. 

St. Paul had almost reached the end of his earthly 
pilgrimage when he wrote to Titus to "Preach the 
word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, 
rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine. 
For the time will come when they will not endure 
sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they 
heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; 
and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, 
and shall be turned unto fables. But watch thou in 
all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evan- 
geUst, make full proof of thy ministry. For I am 
now ready to be offered" — ^like an animal bound with 
cords to the altar, wine and oil have been poured on 
the head, and it only remains to receive the final 
blow; " the time of my departure is at hand" — I 
am hke a vessel riding the gentler waves that beat 
upon the shores, the moorings are being lifted that 
the immortal ship may set sail for glory; ''I have 
fought a good fight" against the forces of evil; "I 
have finished my course" — run the race; "I have 
kept the faith" — as a faithful steward I have held 
fast the Gospel of Kght and life; " henceforth there 
is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which 
the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that 
day, and not to me only, but unto all them that love 
Sis ajpjpearing "^ — Blessed is the man that endureth 

* Titus 4: 2-8. 



76 A Key to True Religion. 

temptation; for when he is tried, he shall receive the 
crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to 
them that love Hirri'^ — Grod is love; and he that 
dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. 
Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have 
holdness in the day of judgment y' because as He is, 
so are we in this world f — Love never faileth: but 
whether there be prophecies, they shall be done 
away ; w^hether there be tongues, they shall cease; 
whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away. 
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a 
child, I thought as a child: now that I am become 
a man, I have put away childish things. For now 
we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: 
now I know in part ; but then shall I know even as 
also have been known. But now abideth faith, hope, 
love, these three; and the greatest of these is love." J 
On this we have a very beautiful and suggestive 
comment: ''Love is not only an eternal grace, but 
the highest among the eternal. Faith is indeed the 
condition of our Christian life, but love is its com- 
pletion. Faith but unlocks the door by which we 
enter into the blessedness of its superior, love. 
Other graces contribute to heaven; love constitutes 
heaven: for a heart of love in a world of love is 
heaven. If love is a happiness derived from the 
happiness of others, how rich must be that happiness 
where countless millions are as happy as the boun- 

*Jamesl:12. fl John 4:16, 17. Jl Cor. 13:8-13. K V. 



The Testimony of the Holy Scriptures. 77 

claries of their finite natures pennit ! And this 
love is but a continuance and enlargement of a grace 
here possessed. If a spark of God's love beams now 
in our heart, it is of the nature of heaven. " f 

In this Chapter we have briefly noticed the Direct 
Testimony of the Holy Scriptm-es that love to God 
and man is the religion of the Bible, the experience 
that brings the soul into harmony with God and that 
fits it for the heavenly inheritance. But few of the 
many Biblical evidences that prove the doctrine to 
be tiTie have been quoted, and these are not all the 
the stronger texts the Word contains respecting the 
truthfulness of this subject. They may serve only 
as a Key to open the way to the understanding and 
enjo}Tnent of the many and stronger, that the mind 
may be flooded with heavenly light and the heart 
filled with heavenly love. 

■^Whedon. 



CHAPTER YI. 

SOME ASPECTS OF THIS EXPERIENCE. 

"Where are divers opinions, they may be all 
false; there can be but one true: and that of times 
must be^brought by piecemeal out of divers branches 
of contrary opinions. For it falls out not seldom, 
that truth is through ignorance, or rash vehemence 
scattered into sundry parts; and like to a little silver 
melted among ruins of a burnt house, must be tried 
out from heaps of much superfluous ashes. There 
is much pains in the search of it, much skill in find- 
ing it; the value of it once found requites the cost of 
both."* 

Every additional angle of vision from which we 
observe any subject gives us an enlarged view of it. 
We have seen that a fixed principle of love is the 
religion of the Bible and the want of the human 
heart, as appears from the Testimony of Men, an 
Analysis of the Subject and the Teachings of the 
Holy Scriptures. Let us now examine 

SOME ASPECTS OF THIS LOVE. 

1. General Statement. 

Have all men an afiectional nature ? If so, and 
love and Christian experience are identical, then are 

* Bishop Hall. 

(78) 



Some AspecU of this Experience. 79 

not all men pious ? All men are thus constituted 
but all are not therefore pious. Man does not re- 
gard God with supreme aflfection and as a result he 
is selfish, running into excess and ruin. He is 
warmly drawn only to those to whom it suits his 
selfish purposes and plans, and whenever they are 
interrupted he becomes initable and enraged in pro- 
portion to his depravity. This is explained in the 
difference between a rehgious nature and a religious 
character: "What is a religious nature? It is 
neither more nor less than to be a man, a being 
made for God and religion; so far, and in such a 
sense, a rehgious being. It implies, in other words, 
that we are so made as to want God, just as a child's 
nature wants a mother and father. It does not fol- 
low, that the child ever knew, or practically speak- 
ing, ever had either one or the other. And yet the 
want is none the less real on that account; for when 
it feels itself an orphan, out on tfee broad world 
alone, it only sighs the more bitterly, it may be, for 
the sohtary lot it is in: and, when it notes the ten- 
der love and faithful sympathy in which other 
children are sheltered in their homes, how sadly does 
it grieve and weep many times for that unknown, 
unremembered parentage it can never look to or 
behold. "So it is vdih our religious nature. It 
may not consciously pine after God, as an orphan for 
his lost parents; and yet God is the necessary com- 
plement of all its feehngs, hopes, satisfactions and 



80 A Key to True Religion. 

endeavors. Without God, all it is becomes abortion. 
It wants God as its completest, almost only want; 
feeling instinctively after Him even in its voluntary 
neglect of Him, and consciously or unconsciously, 
willingly or unwillingly, longing and hungering for 
the bread of his fatherly relationship. And it hun- 
gers none the less truly that it stays aloof from Him, 
refuses to seek Him in prayer, tries to forget Him 
and be hidden from Him, or even fights against all 
terms of duty towards Him; even as the starving 
madman is none the less hungry, or fevered by 
hunger, that he refuses to eat. 

"Now this natural something in the soul, which 
makes God its principal and first want, includes very 
nearly its natural everything. It has not a faculty 
that is not somehow related to God. It feels the 
beauty of God, even his moral beauty. All its 
bosom sentiments would play around him, and bask 
in his goodness.'- Considering who God is, it has the 
feeling of admiration towards Him, rising sometimes 
even up to the pitch of sublimity. God's creating 
strength and all-dominating soverignty in good, are 
just that in the soul, without which he would not be 
sufficiently great. His omnipresence, thought of, 
it may be, with dread, is yet thought of also as the 
needed qualification of a complete world-care and 
government. Reason gets at no limit of rest and 
satisfaction till it culminates in God. The imagina- 
tion flies through solitary worlds of vacancy and cold, 



Some Aspects of this Experience. 81 

till it feels the brightness of God's light on its wings, 
and meets him shining everywhere. Even fear 
wants to come and hide in His bosom; and guilt, 
withering mider His frown, would only frown upon 
Him if he were not exactly just, or less just than He 
is. There is a kind of incipient feeling after the 
state of piety, in what we call the religious nature. 
. . . However corrupted and damaged, however 
fallen, it has the original divine impress on it, every- 
where discernible. It has the same feelings, senti- 
ments, powers of thought and affection, the same 
longings and aspirations, only choked in their 
volume, and crazed by the stormy battle of internal 
discord and passion in which they have their ele- 
ment. The most sad fact — fact and also evidence — 
of human depravity is, that the religious nature 
stands a temple still for God, only scarred and 
blackened by the brimstone fires of evil; more ma- 
jestic possibly as a ruin, than it would be if it did 
not prove its grandeur by the desolations it with- 
stands."^ Then are not all men pious ? No. Here 
lies fundamental error. "Multitudes of us, and 
especially the young, congratulate ourselves that 
we are about as good Christians, on the ground of 
mere natural sentiments, as need be. Nay, we are 
somewhat better Christians than there used to be, 
because we are more philanthropic, better reformers, 
and in that are so easily up to the level of Christian- 

* Sermons on Living Subjects. 
6 



82 A Key to True Religion. 

ity, in a fashion of piety so much more intelligent. 
. . . There is nothing practical in having a merely 
religious nature. A very bad man has it as truly 
as a good: the most confirmed atheist has it. Mere 
natural desire, want, sentiment, God-ward, do not 
TQake religious character. They are even compa- 
tible and consistent, often vdth a character most 
profoundly irreligious. What does it signify 
that the nature is feeling after Grod, when the 
life is utterly against Him ? If a man have a 
natural sense of honor, does it make him an 
honorable man, when he betrays every trust and 
violates every bond of friendship ? If a man has a 
fine natural sensibility to truth, does it make him a 
true man, when he is a sophist or a liar in aU the 
practice of his life ? Where there is naturally a fine 
sense of moral beauty, and a capacity to draw the 
picture of it even with admirable justice and artistic 
skill, does it make the man a morally beautiful 
character, when his life, as will not seldom happen, 
is a life in utter disorder and deformity ? Even a 
thief may have a good sentiment of justice, and be 
only the more consciously guilty because of it. 
There may even be a wonderously tender sensibility 
in the heart of a robber or assassin; such, that in his 
family, or among his clan, he will be abundant in 
the most gentle and kindest offices. And in just the 
same way a man may have the finest feeling of 
natural reverence to God, the highest sentiments of 



Some Aspects of this Experience. 83 

admiration for God's character, the grandest rational 
conviction of his value to the world, as its moral 
Governor and providential Keeper, and yet not have 
so much as a trace of genuine piety in his life. He 
may even go so far as to enjoy the greatness and 
beauty of God, and have the finest things to say of 
him, and have no trace of a genuinely religious char- 
acter, any more than if he were enjojang or praising 
a landscape. He will do the two things, in fact, in 
exactly the same manner; and one will have just as 
much to do for his piety as the other. . . . How 
many ways the workings of the mere rehgious nature 
may be confounded with the workings of a religious 
character and as successful counterfeits, take their 
place. The admiration of God's beauty, what is it 
— as some say — ^but love ? Do we not, all of us, love 
God ? The sentimental pleasure felt in God's quali- 
ties — what is it but the real joy of religion ? How 
pleasant for some to think so ! Even the soul's 
deep throbs of want, — what are they but its hunger- 
inojs after ris^hteousness ? and will not that soul be 
filled, though it refuses to be ? So, many think, or 
seem to think. Yet this is called an intelligent re- 
ligion. People love to hear of it, because it plays 
on their natural sentiment, finely. It is almost a 
modern discovery, and they love to be religious in 
this way. . . . All men have it; no man, even the 
worst, wants it. And the doctrine goes, that, living 
in the plane of nature, we are to cultivate ourselves 



84 A Key to True Beligion. 

in it, and grow better always — and always religious 
because of it. Such is a mock Gospel, and is infus- 
ing itself into the mind of our times; appearing and 
reappearing in our literature, sometimes in our ser- 
mons and turning our youth quite away from every- 
thing most vital and solid in the soul-renewing 
doctrine of Christ. ... It is exactly the religion 
of Herod, who did many things under John's preach- 
ing, and heard him gladly, then took off his head to 
please a dancing woman. He had all the sentiments 
of religion, and loved to have them brought into 
play; but the graceful trip of dancing feet pleased 
him a great deal more ! 

''Pilate, the Koman, had the same religious na- 
ture, felt the greatness, quivered in subhmest awe 
of Jesus, and devoutly washed his hands to be clear 
of his blood, then gave Jesus up to his murderers. 
" Felix had the same rehgion; so had Agrippa; so 
had Balaam; and the world is full of it — sensibihty 
to Grod, truth, right, coupled with a practical non- 
reception of all." * 

To be religious in character is quite another thing. 
"A man is never in rehgious character till he has 
found God; and he will never find Him, till his whole 
voluntary nature goes after Him, and chimes with 
Him in principles and ends. Whatever ends he has 
had of his own must be given up, as being his own, 
and God's must be enthroned in him by a supreme 

* Living Sermons. 



Some Aspects of this Experience. 85 

devotion. ' Ye shall seek for Me and find Me, if ye 
search for Me with all your heart. ' God can not 
have room to spread Himself in the soul and fill it 
with his inspirations, when it is hugging itself, and 
is habitually set on having its own ways. A great 
revolution is so far needed, therefor, if it is to find 
God; for God cannot be revealed in it, or born into 
it, save when it comes away from all its lower ends to 
be in God's. No movings of mere natural sentiment 
reach this point. Nothing but a voluntary surrender 
of the whole life to His will prepares it to be set in 
this open relation to God. And just here it is, ac- 
cordingly, that religious character begins. ... It 
is only where God is moving into it, and living in it, 
that the true piety begins: this is the root and life of 
the religious character. Now it communes know- 
ingly with God, receives of God, walks with God, 
and lives by a hidden life from Him. Now, for the 
first time, the religious nature is fulfilled, and all its 
longings rest in the divine fullness. " * 

A peculiarity of this experience is — 

2. Its supreme devotion to God. 

The human heart manifests afiection in difierent 
directions or toward difierent objects of interest, and 
this possibihty is inseperably connected with our 
social happiness, all our beneficent actions and moral 
character. It is seen in the pleasures of the home 
life, the attachments of friendship, the spirit of devo- 

* Living Sermons. 



86 A -Key to True Religion. 

tion that burns in the heart of the patriot and the 
self-sacrificing labors of the philanthropist. It is 
seen in its brightest, purest state and has its richest 
enjoyment, when it is turned in supreme devotion 
to God. In it are our moral and spiritual condi- 
tions, and, if so, character is dependent on the 
object upon which we bestow supreme love. 

3. It must be universal. 

We should not forget that the Law is written on 
Two Tables. 

(1) We should love our friends. In most cases, per- 
haps, friendships should be intensified and the num- 
ber increased. We should love the dear ones at 
home; there should be a center of tender affection 
— where link to link should bind us in warm and 
reciprocal affections. But this may not reach any 
higher than the merely natural. While Christianity 
teaches special love for the household of faith it 
includes " all men." '^ Hence we are required — 

(2) To love our enemies. 

This may be considered a hard requirement, but 
it is divinely enjoined and graciously provided for in 
the experience of the behever. Christ says: '-If ye 
love them that love you what profit have you ? Even 
so do the publicans. Love your enemies, bless 
them that curse you, pray for them that despite- 
fully use you, that ye may be the children of your 
Father which is in heaven. " f 

* Gal. 6: 10. fMatt. 5:45. 



8a7ne Aspects of this Experience. 87 

This, is objected to on the ground that it is un- 
natural and unreasonable. We admit it is unnatural 
under the present constitution of things. The un- 
renewed heart can live in kindness when circum- 
stances are pleasant, when prosperity shines and 
friends smile — when everything is — 

" As merry as a marriage bell." 

But let it become opposed, let adversity fi'own, let 
the path be interrupted by unfriendly influence, 
then the carnal mind asserts its supremacy. Natm-al 
affection is too circumscribed in its limitations and 
enfeebled in intensity. It is left to Christianity to 
enjoin and provide a better experience. In it we 
are "partakers of the divine nature."^ ^Miat is 
the divine nature of which we pariake ? '' God is 
love.'- f Being born of His Spirit we are partakers 
of His nature — "children," or imitators, "of oirr 
Father in Heaven." :j: CoiTcspondence of character 
produces a like conduct. God so loved his enemies 
that " while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." || 
If God loves His enemies and we are partakers of 
His nature then we shall love ours. 

The unreasonableness of this requirement depends 
upon the point of vision from which we view it. 
Om- logic too frequently follows the lines of our own 
experience. To the man walking in the experience 
of the Hght and power of God's love it is not only a 

*2Peterl:4. flJolin4:16. JMatt 5:45. ||Ilom.5:6. 



88 A Key to True Religion. 

possibility but an actuality — a very reasonable ser- 
vice. 

We are required to love them^ not their sins; to 
pity their folly, weep over their ruin and labor for 
their salvation. This is what God is doing as seen 
in the work of Christ, the movements of the Holy 
Spirit, the ministry of unf alien angels and in all who 
cure truly Chrisfs. Evil angels and wicked men and 
women only acting otherwise. 

Men whose hearts are brought into harmony with 
the great Fountain of light and life are not afraid of 
exhausting it in the most benevolent activities. 
They know that, '' The sun is no less resplendent for 
all the light he sheds when he sinks in the golden 
west; nor sea, when she roars along the shore, less 
full for the showers she gives; nor the rose and hly 
less fragrant, for all the odors they fling on the pass- 
ing breeze; nor the earth leaner, but fatter for the 
cattle that tread its pastures, and the harvests that 
are born from its fields ; and even so it will be found 
that they who have lived most for others have lived 
best for themselves. "* 

Herein Christianity differs from all other religions 
— it commands universal love. Christian patriotism 
includes every land, and Christian philanthropy em- 
braces all men. 

* Guthrie. 



CHAPTER Vn. 

THE ATTAINABILITY OF THE EXPERIENCE. 

Have we been considering an imaginary experi- 
ence or one that can be actualized ? Have we been 
dreaming of spiritual comforts and triumphs which, 
when we awaken to the possibility of their enjoy- 
ment, find them unattainable ? Are we in this 
respect, under a similar deception to that which 
deceives the traveler in the Arabian desert? " Be- 
neath the caravan all is dry and bare; but far in 
advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of 
refreshing waters. The pilgrims hasten forward and 
find nothing but sand where, an hour before, they 
had seen a lake. " * 

The constitution of human nature, the relation 
God sustains to the experience and the actual life of 
many set forth the facts that the experience is not 
only attainable, but a privilege to seek and to enjoy. 

The possibility is seen — 

1. In the constitution of our nature. 

(1) Man is endowed with affection and though it 
has become, in many persons, malevolent instead of 
benevolent, yet the natiu-e remains a possibility in 

^ Macaulay. 

(89) 



90 A Key to True Religion. 

which to produce a life of piety and a character for 
eternity. 

Many theologians and psychologists speak of '* the 
affections" as parental, filial, patriotic, philanthropic 
and pietistic; but whatever may be the sphere of its 
action or object on which it is bestowed — narrow as- 
self, broad as the race, or fixed in supreme at- 
tachment to God, it is the same nature — the 
heart — in its various operations. Such divisions 
tend to mislead the mind and are unhappy in the 
instruction especially of the masses. 

This nature, becoming supremely selfish, repels 
everybody except as they minister to selfish desire; 
if it is simply domestic, confined to the family, it 
opposes all who do not contribute to family interests; 
if it reaches no further than patriotism, it excludes 
persons from other lands or nationalities; when it 
becomes philanthropy proper, it includes all men, a 
sphere it cannot fill except by Divine aid. 

Prof. Thomas C. Upham in his Mental Philosophy 
says, that, while this nature enters into the constitu- 
tion of humanity, man was created with supreme love 
to God as the regulating power of the heart in all 
its operations and exerting proper control over man's 
lower nature. He further shows that this being 
true the restoration of this experience is possible. 
In proving the first he proves the second. Some of 
the arguments are as follows : 

a. By Analogy. '*In all the departments of the 



The Attainability of the Experience. 91 

mind, so far as it has hitherto passed under our 
examination, we have seen evidences of contrivance 
and wisdom; everything has its place, adaptations 
and uses; and nothing, so far as we can judge, is 
done imperfectly. If it were necessary in this 
inquiry to put out of view the Intellect, so wonderful 
in its adaptation and its resources, we should hardly 
fail to find, in the distinct departments of the Sensi- 
bilities, ample illustrations and proofs of this remark. 
The Instincts, which naturally arrest our attention 
first, have obviously their appropriate place and 
office; and although they rank lowest in the enum- 
eration of our active principles, are yet indispensi- 
ble. If man were constituted physically as he is at 
present, and without Appetites, the next higher class 
of the principles involving desire, there would ob- 
viously be a want of adaptation between his mental 
and physical arrangements. The propensities also, 
as we advance still upward, have each their sphere 
of action, their specific nature and uses; and are 
adapted with wonderful skill to the necessities of 
man, and to the relations he sustains. . The same 
remark, and perhaps in a still higher sense, will 
apply to the Affections. As a father, a man has a 
natural affection for his children, that he may thus 
be supported in the discharge of the arduous duties 
he owes to them; as a child, he has naturally an 
affection for his parents; and as man simply, he is 
evidently constituted with a degree of love for his 



^3 A Key to True Religion. 

fellow-man. When we consider the relations which 
men sustain, still more important than those which 
are the basis of the principles which have been men- 
tioned, are we not justified in saying, on the ground 
of Analogy, that there must have been originally in 
the human constitution a principle of love to the 
Supreme Being % If there was not originally in the 
mental constitution such a principle as love to God, 
was not the structure of the mind in that respect 
obviously at variance with what the analogy of its 
nature in other respects requires? If, from the 
urgent necessities of our situation, there must be 
strong ties of love, binding together parents and 
children and brothers; if these ties must reach and 
bind with some degree of strictness all the mem- 
bers of the human family, on what principle 
■can the doctrine be sustained that man was originally 
created without an implanted love to that Being 
Who is infinitely more and better to him than any 
earthly brother or father? " 
b. From the testimony of the Scriptures: 
" We have great reason to believe, from the testi- 
mony of the Scriptures, that man was, in the first 
instance, created with the distinct and operative 
principle of love to his Creator. At the creation, it 
is worthy of notice, that everything which came from 
the hands of the great Architect was pronounced to 
be good. But if man, raised from nothingness into 
■existence, furnished with high powers of thought 



Tlie Attainability of the Experience. 93 

and action, and supported by the daily gift of the 
divine bounty, was created without a principle of 
love to his Maker (analogous to the other implanted 
aftections, only that it existed in an exceedingly 
higher degree, corresponding to the greatness of the 
object), we cannot deny that we are utterly unable 
to perceive in such a result the basis of so marked a 
commendation, as far as the parents of the human 
race were concerned. It would seem, on the con- 
trary, that such a work, framed with such a disre- 
gard of the most important relations, could not be 
pronounced good, even in the estimate of human 
reason, much less in that of a reason infinitely com- 
comprehensive and divine. . . . Many of those 
passages of Scripture which are addressed to man 
in his present fallen state, appear to contemplate the 
restoration of this great principle. When the 
Savior, on a certain occasion, was asked, in respect 
to the commandments, which of them was to be 
regarded as having the first or leading place. His 
answer was: ' Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all 
thy mind. This is the first and the great command- 
ment' Matt. 22: 37, 38. This language implies, to 
say the least, the possibility of the existence of this 
principle; and particularly, that in a sinless or per- 
fect state of the human race, it is indispensible. 

Finally, that renovation of our nature, which is 
so frequently spoken of in the New Testament, 



■94 A Key to True Beligion. 

under the name of a New Creation, or a New Birth, 
and which is represented as being brought about by 
Divine assistance, unquestionably in the meaning of 
the writers of the Scriptures, involves the restora- 
tion of this essential element of the mental constitu- 
tion. To be what he is required to be, man must 
be what he was before the Fall; and in order to be 
in this situation, the great requisite is, what has just 
been mentioned, to love God with all the heart. 
We feel authorized, therefore, in asserting that 
originally supreme love to God was an essential 
element of human nature; and that, at the present 
moment, it is, or ought to be, in every human 
bosom, a direct and operative principle."* 

We prefer to say that originally man's afiectional 
nature was in a state of supreme love to God, but in 
the exercise of this voluntary principle, or in be- 
stowing it inordinately on other objects, he 
ceased to love God — lost Him out of his heart — and 
having no properly governing power within, 
wrought his own ruin. If it were his original 
experience, may it not again become his? The fact 
that the nature exists is evidence that the experience 
may be restored. 

(2.) It being our only properly governing power 
is evidence of the possibility of its restoration. 

For proof that Supreme love to God is the prop- 
erly controlhng power of human nature, see Chap- 
ter IX. 

*Mental Science. 



The Attainability of the Experience. 95 

To say it is not a possibility is to deny that ade- 
quate provisions have been made to save man from 
his fallen state, or remove the follies and crimes 
that bm'den and curse the world; it is to say, that 
no improvement is possible to the human race, and 
that from the cradle to the grave there is only a 
development from bad to worse. The lower appe- 
tites and passions ungoverned, and appealed to and 
excited by the surrounding evils and temptations of 
a fallen world, what hope of improvement for 
humanity? Man, left alone, -is impelled to deeds of 
daring, crime and shame by a double force — the one 
within, and the exciting cause without — ^which drive 
and lead him on by forces which he has neither the 
power nor inclination sufficient to resist. But we 
see government, improvement, real beauty of 
character, in multiplied thousands, and, if so, the 
experience is attainable. 

Its attainability is proven. 

2. In the relation Grod sustains to the experience. 

(1) He demands it. 

The references we have made to the command- 
ments prove that this experience is divinely required. 

When Peter met the Master after the resurrection, 
the questions asked and answered, teach that heart 
ahenation fi'om God is fatal: '' So, when they had 
dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, ' Simon, son of 
Jonas, lovest thou Me more than these ? " He saith 
unto Him, ' Yea, Lord, Thou knowest that I love 



96 A Key to True Religion. 

Thee.' . . . He saith unto him the second time, 
' Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me ? ' He saith 
unto Him, ' Yea, Lord, Thou knowest that I love 
Thee. ' . . . He saith unto him the third time, 
' Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me ? ' Peter was 
grieved, because he said unto him the third time 
' Lovest thou Me ? ' And he said unto Him, ' Lord, 
Thou knowest all things; Thou knowest that I love 
Thee.'"* 

These questions and answers show what experi- 
ence is necessary when God makes requisition for 
character. 

Simon, the sorcerer heard Philip preach the Gos- 
pel in Samaria, and believed, and when he was bap- 
tized, continued with Philip, and wondered at the 
signs and great miracles which were done. Peter 
and John went up from Jerusalem to Samaria to 
pray for the people, and to lay their hands on them, 
that they might receive the Holy Spirit. When 
Simon witnessed the people receiving the Holy Spirit 
at the laying on of the hands of the apostles, he 
offered them money that he might be able to do the 
same. Peter said to him: " Thy money perish with 
thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God 
may be purchased with money: Thou has neither 
part nor lot in this matter, for thy heart is not right 
in the sight of God. " f This accords with the declar- 
ation, — " He is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; 

* John 21: 15-17. f^cts 8: 9-21. 



The Attainability of the Experience. 97 

neither is that circumcision which is outward in the 
flesh. But he is a Jew which is one inwardly; and 
circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and 
not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but 
God."^ St. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, 
declares that all gifts and deeds are valueless with- 
out love. Though we could speak in every lan- 
guage of earth, and with the eloquence of angels; 
though we have the gift of prophecy and a knowledge 
of the mysteries of the doctrines of Christianity; 
though we understand all science, give all our goods 
to feed the poor and our bodies to be burned, if they 
are without love they profit nothing, f 

(2) God has promised it. "The Lord thy God 
will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy 
seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, 
and with all thy soul that thou mayest live. :j; And 
I will give them an heart to know Me, that I am the 
Lord, and they shall be My people, and I will be 
their God, for they shall return unto Me with their 
whole heart. . . . The Lord hath appeared of 
old unto me, saying. Yea, I have loved thee with an 
everlasting love; therefore with loving kindness 
have I drawn thee. . . . Behold, the days 
come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new cove- 
nant with the house of Israel, and with the house of 
Judah; not according to the covenant that I made 
Tvdth their fathers in the day that I took them by the 

*Kom. 2:28, 29. fl Cor. 13:1. t Deut. 30: 6. 

7 



98 A Key to True Religion. 

iiand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, which 
My covenant they broke, although I was a husband 
unto them, saith the Lord; but this shall be my 
covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: 
After those days, saith the Lord, I will put My laws 
in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; 
and will be their God, and they shall be my people.* 
Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye 
shall be clean from all your filthiness, and from all 
your idols will I cleanse you. A new heart also 
will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within 
you; and I will take away the stony heart out of 
your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh; and 
I will put my spirit within you and cause you to 
walk in My Statutes, and ye shall keep My Judg- 
ments and do them."f The promises are not limited 
to the Jews, but extended to the Gentiles also, if 

(3) He has made provisions for it. 

Is it not reasonable that he would enjoin the life 
and promise to bestow it without making provisions 
for its enjoyment? 

The Lord directs the heart into the love of God 
and patience of Christ. || The provisions of divine 
helpfulness are in Jesus Christ. All the sacrifices 
and types employed by His ancient people fore- 
shadowed Christ, in whom was and is divine help. 
" God so loved the world that He gave His only be- 

*Jeremiali 24: 7; 31: 3, 31-33. fEz. 36; 35-27. tisa. 11: 10; 
42: 1; Rom, 15: 9-12. || 2 Thes. 3: 5. 



The Attainability of the Experience. 99 

gotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should 
not perish, but have everlasting life. ""'^ This Jesus 
hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. 
Therefore, being by the right hand of God exalted, 
and having received of the Father the promise of 
the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this which ye 
now see and hear.f If thou knowest the gift 
of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me 
to drink; thou wouldst have asked of Him, and He 
would have given thee living water. Whosoever 
drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never 
thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be 
in him a well of water springing up into everlasting 
life. X And that men may come into this Heavenly 
knowledge and experience, He commissions His serv- 
ants — 

"To tell tlie old, old story 
Of Jesus and His love." 

St. Paul, in relating to Agrippa his experience in 
being rescued from sin, said that Jesus Christ com- 
missioned him to preach to the Gentiles, ' ' to open 
their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, 
and from the power of Satan unto God, that they 
may receive the forgiveness of sins, and inheritance 
among them which are sanctified by faith that is in 
me. II Unto every one of us is given according to the 
measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore he saith, 

* John 3: 16. f Acts 2: 23-33. % Jolm 4: 10, 14. 

1 Acts 26: 18. 



100 A Key to True Religion. 

When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive 
and gave gifts unto men. From whom the whole 
body fitly joined together and compacted by that 
which every joint supphest, according to the effectual 
worldng in the measure of every part, maketh in- 
crease of the body unto the edifying of itself in 
love. If so be that ye have heard Him, and have 
been taught by Him as the truth is in Jesus. That 
ye put off concerning the former conversation, the 
old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful 
lusts; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, 
and that ye put on the new man, which, after God, 
is created in righteousness and true hohness.* Un- 
der the influence of these provisions many a truthful 
heart, touched by the divine presence and filled with 
divine glory, has joyfully exclaimed: "By the 
grace of God, I am what I am! " f In these frag- 
mentary portions of the Scriptures we see how 
abundantly God has provided for our enjoyment of 
his love. (In the succeeding chapter the means to 
secure the experience will be more clearly presented.) 

3. That it has been and is being actualized in the 
experience of men. 

(1.) Among those of Old Testament times are 
the following: 

a. It is very beautifuUy portrayed in the life of 
Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph was a favorite 
son with his father, for whom he showed much 

* Eph. 4, 7, 8, 16, 21, 24. f 1 Cor. 15: 10. 



The AUainability of the Experience. 101 

aifection, and to whom he rendered cheerful obedi- 
ence. His brothers were not so amiable, and the 
special favor shown Joseph excited their jealousy 
and hatred, and they determined to slay him. How 
true, ' ' He that hateth his brother is a murder " — 
has in him that disposition which, provoked suffi- 
ciently, will murder. 

On one occasion they were sent to feed their 
father's flock at Shechern. The father, becoming 
uneasy for their safety, sent Joseph to ascertain if 
it were well with them. He found them at Dothan. 
When they saw him coming their envious hearts 
began to devise a plan for his destruction. They 
seized him and threw him into a pit. Some Midian- 
itish merchantmen passing by about that time, 
took him from the pit and sold him as a slave. 
He was a youth of about seventeen years, and unac- 
customed to aught else but parental love and home 
care. From his home and native land he was sold — 
sold as a slave; sold for no crime, but when he was 
engaged in a mission of love for them that sold him. 
Those were circumstances of no ordinary trial, and 
sufficient to exasperate most men against their 
ofienders. After thirteen years of experience as a 
slave, overseer of the king's house and a prisoner, 
strange as it may seem — stranger than fiction — he 
was elevated to the second position in the wealthiest 
monarchy of the old world. 



102 A Key to True Religion. 

A calamity smites the land. Famine comes 

"And the eager fiend 
Blows poison mildew from his shriveled lips 
And taints the golden ear." 

Through the influence of Joseph, Egypt has pro- 
vided against it. Cities and towns are crowded with 
grain. People from other countries are driven there 
for provisions, and among the multitudes are the 
cruel brothers. They appear in the presence of the 
Prince, but do not recognize him. They suppose 
Joseph is dead. Twenty-two years have passed 
since they have seen their youthful brother. He is 
now grown into manly stature and mature age. He 
is arrayed in the splendor of courtly apparel and 
speaks to them with the air of an Egyptain prince. 
He recognizes them, and, instead of returning evil 
for evil, love rules, and for the rags, poverty and 
degradation they imposed upon him, he gives them 
sacks of provision, gold, and silver, and herds, and 
lands, and brings the entire family to share in the 
abundance and glory of his exaltation. 

At the age of one hundred and ten years Joseph 
died, leaving kind words for his brethren and bless- 
ings upon Israel. 

Love made his youth as the dawn of a beautiful 
morning, his life as the smiles of a lovely summer 
day, and the end of his pilgrimage as a sunset that 
guilds the world with its golden glory. 

b. This principle is manifest in much of the life 



The Attainability of the Experience. 103^ 

of David, the Shepherd boy, Israel's great poet,, 
statesman and king. Though he lived at a time that 
required him to war for the defence of Israel, yet in 
the midst of some of the most provoking circum^ 
stances of liis life, his conduct gave pathetic exam- 
ples of tenderness and love. By his fidelity to truth 
and right, his valorous character and chivalrous 
deeds, he had become worthy of a crown. The 
Lord directed His prophet, Samuel, to seek and 
anoint the shepherd boy king of Israel. 

His genius for music, and his chivalrous skill in 
defending the honor of Israel brought him in favor 
with King Saul and into the royal court. His brave 
deeds also brought him in favor with the people. 
The men of Israel shouted his praise, and the Israel- 
itish women sang songs in honor of his Adctories, and 
recognized him a greater conqueror than Saul. They 
said Saul has slain his thousands and David his ten 
thousands. These songs and the increasing popu- 
larity of David aroused Saul to jealousy and bitter 
hatred. David was driven fi*om the king's house; 
from the royal court, and sought as a criminal and 
an outlaw, though always obedient to the king's 
commands, and a son-in-law in his home. Though 
Saul had cast his javehn at David, thereby relieving 
him from obligations of loyalty, according to the 
laws of the time, and though he sought to destroy 
his hfe and make his name odious, David was not 
disposed to injure him. He fled fi'om place to place 



104 A Key to True Religion. 

to save his life, or that he might not injure his en- 
emy. He reaches the wilderness of Engidi still pur- 
sued by the king and his soldiers. As they came to 
the sheep-cotes they find a cave into which Saul 
goes to rest. Here David and his men are secreted 
and permitted to do as they desire mth Saul; but 
David will not lift up his hand against him, except 
to cut ofi* a piece of his garment as an evidence that 
he is not disposed to injure the king. His heart 
smites him for even this act, and after Saul passes out 
of the cave David cries to him: ''Wherefore hear- 
est thou men's w^ords saying. Behold, David seeketh 
they hurt ? Behold, this day thine eyes have seen 
how that the Lord had delivered thee to-day into my 
hand in the cave; and some bade me kill thee, but 
mine eye spared thee; and I said, I will not put 
forth mine hand against my lord, for he is the Lord's 
annointed. Moreover, my father, see, yea, see the 
skirt of thy robe in my hand, for in that I cut 
off the skirt of thy robe and killed thee not, know, 
now, and see that there is neither evil nor transgres- 
sion in my hand, and I have not sinned against thee; 
yet thou huntest my soul to take it."* What a 
triumph of love ! In much of his life we see beau- 
tiful expressions of it. Had he always continued 
with his heart toward God, his life would have been 
one of perpetual sunshine. There was a time when 
it faltered and failed; and, though restored, the 

*1 Samuel 34: 9-11. 



The Attainability of the Experience. 105 

beautiful songs of Zion, to a considerable degree, 
faded from his lips, and his sun dipped at last be- 
neath mists where otherwise all would have been 
bright. 

c. Such an experience was the strength of the 
well-poised character of Daniel, the Hebrew captive, 
and servant of the Most High. In his youth it 
beamed forth in his fidelity to temperance and 
rio^ht in the kino^'s house. 

Was he threatened with death for not complying 
with the idolatrous request of the king, he calmly 
declared his fidehty to the God of Heaven, whom 
he believed would deliver him from the threatened 
fire; but, if not delivered, he could not be disloyal 
to God. His purity of character and wisdom 
brought him again and again in favor with the king 
and the people, and as often excited their envy and 
hate. When in their wrath they demanded him to 
engage in idolatrous worship he drew only nearer to 
God, and under the most threatening and dangerous 
circumstances for a man to be devoted to Heaven, 
he was known to kneel three times each day at his 
window, '' open toward Jerusalem," and there pour 
out his heart to the God of his fathers. And, 
whether in high oJficial position, or in the fiery fur- 
nace or lion's den, or catching glimpses of the divine 
glory and enjoying visions of the events of coming 
ages, he manifested the same lovely character. 

(2) This principle is manifest in the life of those 



106 A Key to True Beligion. 

servants of God whose history is given in the New 
Testament Scriptures. 

a. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was the 
chief of the seven deacons appointed to attend the 
business necessary to remove the complaints in the 
early church at Jerusalem. His great miracles and 
powerful teachings designated him the chief of the 
seven, and awakened the bitter animosities of the 
Jews. "They gnashed on him with their teeth,'' 
and, after they cast him out of the city they began 
to stone him. As the stones fell thick and fast upon 
him he commended his spirit to the Lord Jesus 
Christ; then, kneeling down, ''cried with a loud 
voice, Lord^ lay not this sin to their charge. And 
when he had said this he fell asleep. " * A shower 
of stones pelting out his life, awakened no hatred in 
his heart, but prayer for those who were hurling the 
deadly missiles. 

b. St. Paul exhibited it in his conduct as clearly 
as he taught it in his writings. Any one acquainted 
with his Hfe, cannot doubt the state of his heart be- 
fore his remarkable deliverance from sin. He de- 
lighted in the persecution of saints, and when di- 
vinely arrested, he was on his way to Damascus with 
a commission of cruelty against the followers of 
Christ. No sooner saved than he was filled with 
zeal for the salvation of others, and cheerfully " suf- 
fered all things lest he should hinder the Gospel." 

* Acts 7: 60. 



The Attainability of the Experience. 107 

Of noble parentage, versed in all the scholastic sub- 
tleties of his times, with constantly increasing pros- 
pects of worldly advantages and advancement, he 
freely forsook all for a life of pure benevolence. 
He says: " I might also have confidence in the flesh. 
If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he 
might trust in the flesh, I more; circumcised the 
eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of 
Benjamin; a Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching 
the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting 
the church; touching the righteousness which is in 
the law, blameless. But what things were gain to me, 
those I counted loss for Christ. " "^ . . . In aU 
his course he " counted not his life dear unto him- 
self," but, travehng far and wide, in the midst of 
fiery trials and harrassing persecutions, he shunned 
not to deliver a pure message, and to manifest a 
most benevolent character. The benevolent, self- 
sacrificing, loving disposition and life of St. Paul have 
a beautiful and impressive climax as he stands a 
heroic prisoner before king Agrippa. He had been 
unjustly arrested and cruelly dealt with; he had 
been thrust into the prison, where in the dismal 
dungeon at Caisarea his clanking chains had been 
heard for two years. Now he eloquently pours 
forth his arguments, not so much for his own de- 
fence as the exaltation of the Gospel. He still wears 
his fetters; his enemies look upon him with malign- 

*Phil. 3: 7. 



108 A Key to True Religion. 

ity and illy treat him, yet his words are kind as those 
of a mother, and as beautiful as the smile of a babe. 
When the deeply convicted king, struck with the 
gentleness of his demeanor, the tenderness of his 
words, the fervor of his spirit, and the power of his 
logic, cried out: "Almost thou persuadest me to 
be a Christain." What a reply is that which falls 
from the apostle's lips and startles the assem- 
bly: '' I would to God that not only thou, but also 
all that hear me this day, were both almost and alto- 
gether such as I am, except these honds^^ 

Though weary, worn and sore with the chains he 
had so long and unjustly borne, he only desired that 
his enemies might share with him in the joys of 
Christ's grace, and that without suflPering alike 
bonds. Through the power of divine love he tri- 
umphed over every feeling of revenge, and, caring 
not for his own sujfferings, he thought only of the 
honor of his Lord and the salvation of his enemies. 
" Without these hands " reveals his heart as the hght 
of the sun reveals objects by day — a heart of love, 
which enabled him to triumph over all wrong, and 
leave in his path an influence freighted with spiritual 
beauty and blessing. 

(3) Nor are we confined to Biblical times for wit- 
nesses of this experience. They have lived in all 
ages of the world's history, and there are thousands 
of joyful witnesses of it to-day. Some of those of 

* Acts 36: 29. 



The Attainability of the Experience. 109 

modern times who testify of its enjoyment to a 
greater or less degi'ee are: 

a. John Fletcher. He was an English Episcopal 
preacher and vicar of Madely, and one of the most 
blameless of men. " I will confess him to all the 
world; and I declare mito you, in the presence of 
God, the holy Trinity, I am now ' dead indeed to 
sin.' . . . He is my Prophet, Priest, and King; 
my indwelling hohness; my all in all." * 

b. Thomas C. Upham was an able educator and 
preacher in the Congregational Church. He testi- 
fies: "I was then redeemed by a mighty power, 
and filled with the blessing of perfect love. ... I 
was never able before that time to say, with sincerity 
and confidence, that I loved my heavenly Father 
with all my strength. But, aided by Divine grace, 
I have been enabled to use this language, which 
involves, as I understand it, the true idea of 
Christian perfection or holiness, both then and ever 
since. There was no intellectual excitement, no 
marked joys, when I reached this great rock of 
practical salvation. But I was distinctly conscious 
when I reached it. "f 

c. Rev. James B. Taylor was an efficient Presby- 
terian minister, who declared: " I am ready to tes- 
tify to the world that the Lord has blessed my soul 
beyond my highest expectations. People may call 
this blessing by what name they please, ' faith of 

*H. A. Rogers, 136. f Guide to Holiness. 



110 A Key to True Religion. 

assurance, holiness, perfect love, sanctification. ' It 
makes no difference to me whether they give it a 
name or no name; it contains a blessed reality, and, 
thanks to my heavenly Father, it is my privilege to 
enjoy it; it is yours also, and the privilege of all, to 
enjoy the same, and go beyond anything I have ever 
yet experienced."* 

d. Dr. E. M. Levy is a prominent Baptist 
minister. He testifies: ''I seemed filled with the 
fullness of God. I wept for joy. All night long I 
wept. All the next day, at the family altar, in the 
street, and in the sanctuary, tears continued to flow. 
The fountain of my being seemed broken up, and 
my heart was dissolved in gratitude and praise. My 
soul seemed filled with pulses, everyone thrilling 
and throbbing with such waves of love and rapture 
that I thought I must die from excess of life, "f 

e. Bishop Whatcoat, one of the early Bishops of 
the Methodist Episcopal Church, said: '' After 
many sharp and painful conflicts, and many gracious 
visitations also, on the 28th of March, 1761, my 
soul was drawn out and engaged in a manner it never 
was before. Suddenly I was stripped of all hut 

love.^^X 

f. Dr. Joseph Benson was an English Wesleyan 

minister, and commentator of the Old and New 
Testament: ''My soul was, as it were, led unto 

*Letters to Rev. A. McLean. [Advocate of Holiness, 12. 
:{:Lost Chapters of Methodism. 



The Attainability of the Experience. Ill 

God, and satiated with His goodness. He so 
strengthened my faith as to perfectly banish all my 
doubts and fears, and so filled me with humble, 
peaceful love, that I could and did devote my soul 
and body, and health and strength, to His glory and 
service. . . . Oh, what a change hath God wrought 
in me! Glory be to God! I am indeed put in pos- 
session of a new nature. . . . Over and over 
again, with infinite sweetness, did I dedicate myself 
to God."* 

g. Dr. Steel, auther of "Love Enthroned," 
"Mile-Stone Papers," and an able commentator of 
the Scriptures, describes his experience as follows: 
" Suddenly I became conscious of a mysterious 
power exerting itself upon my sensibilities. My 
physical sensations, though not of a nervous tem- 
perament, in good health, alone, and calm, were 
like those electric sparks passing through my bosom 
with slight but painless shocks, melting my hard 
heart into a firey stream of love. Christ became so 
unspeakably precious, that I instantly dropped all 
earthly good, — reputation, property, friends, family, 
everything, in the twinkle of an eye; and my soul 
cried out: 

'None but Christ to me be given 
None but Christ in earth or heaven.'" f 

The laymen have alike experience and give alike 
testimony. 

* Biography, 55. f Advocate to Holiness, 1870. 



112 A Key to True Religion. 

h. Lady Maxwell: "I rest in Him; I dwell in 
Him. Sinldng into Him, I lose myself, and prove 
a life of fellowship with Deity so divinely sweet I 
would not relinquish it for a thousand worlds. It is, 
indeed, a narrow path; but love levels every moun- 
tain, makes all easy. 

' O love divine, how sweet thou art!' 

" When I look back, I rejoice to see what I am 
saved from; when I look forward, it is all pure 
expanse of unbounded love. Surely the heaven of 
heavens is love, "f 

i. Mrs. President Edwards: '' I cannot find 
language to express how certain the everlasting love 
of God appeared; the everlasting mountains and 
hills were but shadows to it. My safety and hap- 
piness, and eternal enjoyment of God's immutable 
love, seemed as durable and unchangable as God 
Himself. Melted and overcome by the sweetness 
of His assurance, I fell into a great flow of tears, 
and could not forbear weeping aloud. The pres- 
ence of God was so near and so real that I seemed 
scarcely conscious of anything else. 

'' In the House of God, so conscious was I of the 
joyful presence of the Holy Spirit, that I could 
scarcely refrain from leaping with transports of 
joy. My soul was filled and overwhelmed with 
light, and love, and joy in the Holy Ghost, and 
seemed just ready to go away from the body. . . . 

*Life of Lady Maxwell. 



The Attainability of the Experience. 113 

This exultation of soul subsided into a heavenly calm, 
and a rest of soul in God, which was even sweeter 
than what preceded it."* 

j. Mrs. Hester Ann Rogers: "I was deeply 
penetrated with His presence, and stood as if unable 
to move, and was insensible to all around me. 
While thus lost in communion with my Savior, He 
spake those words to my heart: ' All that I have is 
thine. I am Jesus, in Whom dwells all the fullness of 
the Godhead bodily. I am thine. My Spirit is thine. 
My Father is thine. They love thee as I love thee. 
The whole Deity is thine. He even now over- 
shadows thee. He now covers thee with a cloud of 
His presence.' All this was so realized to my soul, 
in a manner which I cannot explain, that I sank down 
motionless, being unable to sustain the weight of His 
glorious presence, and the fullness of His Love."f 
k. Madam Guyon was imprisoned in the French 
Bastile for four years because of her religious teach- 
ing. She was a Christian lady of deep rehgious experi- 
ence, and, while imprisoned, she declared: '' The 
very stones of my prison appear like rubies in my 
eyes. " During her imprisonment she wrote the fol- 
lowing: 

"Oil! it is good to soar 

These bolts and bars above, 

To Him Whose purpose I adore. 
Whose providence I love, 

And in Thy mighty will I find 

The joy, the freedom of the mind." 

*Wife Dr. Edwards. fJournal. 8 



114 A Key to True Beligion. 

1. William Carvosso was a class-leader for more 
than fifty years, in the Wesleyan Church, in Eng- 
land. His experience is given as follows: ''Just 
at that moment a heavenly influence filled the room; 
and no sooner had I uttered or spoken the words 
from my heart, 'I shall have the blessing now,' than 
refining fire went through my heart, illuminating my 
soul; scattered its life through every part, and sanc- 
tified the whole. I then received the full witness of 
the Spirit that the blood of Jesus had cleansed me 
from all sin. I cried out, ' This is what I wanted. 
I have now got a new heart. I am emptied of self 
and sin, and filled with God. ' "* 

To these we could add the testimony of thousands 
that it is 

"Not in grief and not in pleasure, 
Is life's purpose or its plan; 
But that all things in their measure. 
Teach us love to God and man." 

This, then, is no imaginary experience, but actual, 
the possibility of its attainment being indicated in 
the constitution of our nature, taught in the Word 
of God, and enjoyed by men in all ages of the world. 
He Whose life we are to live, revealed it from the 
manger to the cross; and from the grave to the ascen- 
sion; and from the ascension to the work He now 
performs in the sad, broken and ruined hearts of 

*Memoir. 



The Attainability of the Experience. 115 

humanity. In Him it shines most resplendently. 
No wonder those who experience it say: 

"Oh, what a heaven of heavens is this. 

This swoon of silent love! 
How poor the world's sublimest bliss 

Compared with joys above." 



CHAPTER Vin. 

MEANS AND METHODS OF ATTAINMENT. 

In searching for truth that respects especially the 
welfare of the soul, " We must admit nothing hast- 
ily, assent to nothing without examining the grounds 
on which it stands. Credulity, precipitation and 
confidence are irreconcilable enemies to knowledge 
and wisdom. " Our conduct and character are such 
that we need both the forgiveness of sins and a 
change of our moral nature. The means adequate 
to our spiritual wants must embrace both the acts 
and the state. He who walked the waves, beneath 
whose feet they became as marble pavement, has 
sounded the depth of human want, and in His Gos- 
pel provided the means and prescribed the methods 
for man's complete dehverance from his moral and 
spiritual difficulties. Let us observe them as em- 
ployed: 

1. In Christian Communities. 

(1) On the Divine side. Though these have been 
noticed, further consideration of them may not be 
unprofitable. 

a. The work of Jesus Christ. 

As long as the heart was turned to God, man 
was a loyal subject of the Divine government. He 

(116) 



Means and MetJiods of Attainment. 117 

believed with a heart unto righteousness until he 
listened to the suggestions of Satan, and acceded to 
his propositions. Since then, without Divine inter- 
position, he would have continued forever in unbe- 
Kef toward God. This is observed in the conduct of 
Adam after he had become a sinner. Conscious of 
his guilt and moral unworthiness, he endeavored to 
hide himself from the Divine presence, choosing 
rather the protection of the trees of the Garden. In 
sinning, his heart was changed, by which God's rela- 
tion to him was necessarily changed. God now 
governs him as a disloyal subject. However, with 
all, God loved him, still loves him, and will love 
him forever. Man may reject Him, and live within 
the miserable limits of misplaced affection, here, 
hereafter and forever. Di\dne mercy prevailed in 
spite of man's unbelief, and God gi'aciously provided 
for the salvation of the race. He told man that he 
had sinned, and thereby exposed himself to its awful 
consequences, but if he would return in heart to 
Hjm he should be saved. Thus He taus^ht those of 
the Patriarchal Age, the IsraeKtes and all who would 
heed his instruction. This instruction was given 
through angelic messengers, visions, and the Moral 
and Ceremonial Laws. These taught what man is 
by sin, what he must be through grace, and encour- 
aged him to trust the Lord for salvation. 

The Moral Law, as it was given at Sinai, failed 
to save; the Ceremonial Law, through human blind- 



118 A Key to True Religion. 

ness, became unmeaning. The world had lost not 
only the law from the heart, but the model of holi- 
ness from before their eyes. The culture of the ages 
had failed to save; the Jews had become morally 
degraded to an alarming degree, and both Jews and 
Gentiles were better qualified to test whether or not 
Jesus Christ was an imposition upon the credulity 
of the people; the one by their jealousy, the other 
by their culture. These things, with other circum- 
stances, made the time highly appropriate for the 
coming of Christ to reveal God, and to redeem the 
world. He who was then so dimly seen through 
types and shadows, came upon the earth in visible 
form, and declared what subsequent history sus- 
tains, that He is the Light of the world. 

We here observe a few things respecting the 
coming of Christ. 

a. The failure of the Law to save. 

" For what the Law could not do in that it was 
weak through the flesh." This impotency of the 
Law does not consist in its character, demand, or 
comprehensiveness. It is a perfect rule of duty, 
and its sanctions sufficiently powerful to enforce 
obedience to them who are able to obey. It is im- 
potent through the moral weakness of man — ** weak 
through the flesh."* The Law has no power to 
pardon nor to remove guilt. Man being a trans- 
gressor, and antagonizing the Law in both disposi- 

*Rom. 8: 24. 



Means and MetTiods of Attainment. 119 

tion and conduct, the conflict between them is irre- 
concilable and eternal without Divine aid. ''For we 
know that the Law is spiritual, but I am carnal, 
sold under sin." * Hence the conflict. 

The Ceremonial Law was designed as a means of 
reconciliation, but through the increased and in- 
creasing depravity of man, it more and more dimly 
revealed Christ, until the vision had become insuffi- 
cient to turn the heart to God. 

h. God's method of reconciliation in Chiist. 

'' For what the Law could not do," whether Moral 
or Ceremonial, '* in that it was weak through the 
flesh, God sending His Own Son in the likeness of 
sinful flesh, and for sin condemned sin in the flesh, that 
the righteousness of the Law might be fulfilled in 
us who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." 
The Son came in "the likeness of sinful flesh" — 
came in a sinless human nature. Had He come in 
sinful human nature, there would have been no 
model of purity, no redemption from sin; not so 
good an outline of the Divine heart as was dimly re- 
vealed in the sacrificial worship. Though surrounded 
by every provocation that a fallen world could pro- 
duce, there was nothing in Him but what accords 
with the spirit of holiness. He has been spoken of 
as " The Ten Commandments ahve — the Moral Law 
incarnate." Again — "What an empire over His 
passions ! ^Yhere is the man, where is the sage, 

*Rom. 7: 14. 



130 A Key to True Religion. 

who knows how to act, to suffer, and to die without 
weakness and without display ? My friend, men do 
not invent like this; and the facts respecting Socrates, 
which no one doubts, are not so well attested as 
those about Jesus Christ."* ''And for sin con- 
demned sin in the flesh." When He was brought to 
the most painful and degrading death that men 
thought to inflict. He had no bitterness. "He 
was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He opened 
not His mouth; He is brought as a lamb to the 
slaughter, and, as a sheep before the shearers, is 
dumb; so He opened not His month. "f What an 
offering for sin ! What a contrast between the 
Crucified and the crucifiers ! Benevolence, love, 
patience untold on one hand; cruel, unprovoked 
malice on the other. Love patiently endured all 
the painful and undeserved inflictions. The model 
was in no way marred, though the suffering was 
unto death. The test was to the utmost, and yet, 
in the midnight of the world's darkness, His life 
shone — The Golden Sun in the Firmament of the 
Moral Universe, 

In the character manifested. He gave the world a 
model of what it must become, revealed what it is, 
and thus " condemned sin in the flesh " — condemned 
the life the world lives. The race, though " sold 
under sin," is here redeemed to purity, and as this 
light becomes the light of men, they are saved to God. 

* Geike's Christ. t Isa. 53: 7. 



Means and Methods of Attainment. 121 

This was not a merely commercial transaction. 
The world is none the less guilty because of His suf- 
fering and death, wliich it would be were it a com- 
mercial afiair. His sufferinsfs and death are to be 
regarded in a higher sense. Had He not come, suf- 
fered and died, thereby shedding Heaven's light 
upon the world, our loss would be remediless and 
eternal. In this sense His sufferings and death are 
substitutional, but the relation they sustain to our 
salvation is better expressed by the words govern- 
mental and restorati^'e. 

Whatever His offering for sin was, it was not a 
price paid to the devil, as was once taught by some, 
for neither God, man nor angel owed the usurper 
anything; nor to cancel a debt owed the Father by 
man, and paid by the Son, for then the claims of 
the Father must cease, as '' Jesus Christ, by the 
grace of God, tasted death for every man; " * nor 
amount paid to meet the claims of the Law upon us, 
for then its claims must cease. The Father still has 
His claims upon us, and the requirements of the 
Moral Law can never cease. Christ's work is gov- 
ernmental, rectoral and moral, in that it exposes the 
heinousness of sin — our state; reveals what we must 
become — as He is; f and teaches the Divine willing- 
ness, purpose and abiUty to deliver us from sin upon 
our return to Him. It removes the antagonism of 
the Law, because it brings the soul into its conf orm- 

*lJohn4: 17. t Wesley. 



123 A Key to True Religion. 

ity, hence governmental. It is God's method of re- 
storing the Law to the heart, hence restorative. It 
gives such a disclosure of the terribleness of sin, 
such a revelation of Divine love, that man, seeing 
what he is and what he must become to enjoy the 
favor of God, wiU be influenced to return to God, 
and be brought thus to what he should be; hence, 
governmental, moral and restorative. 

" To shame our sins He blushed in blood; 
He closed His eyes to show us God; 
Let all the world fall down and know. 
That none but God such love can show." 

"That the righteousness of the Law might be 
fulfilled in us. " Christ did not make void the Moral 
Law; that cannot be. The Ceremonial Law had its 
fulfillment in Him and forever passed away. He 
being the substance of that shadow. There never 
can be but one Moral Law for the government of 
morally accountable beings, if the Governor and 
Law-Giver remain '*the same yesterday and to-day 
and forever." * It was engraven on stone to denote 
its perpetuity, and by the finger of God to signify its 
authority. 

Whatever Jesus designs in telling the young ruler 
what he must do in order to enter into eternal life — 
" keep the commandments " — He evidently does not 
regard the law as abrogated. '' The righteousness 
of the law " must be " filled in us," and this is accom- 

*Heb. 13:8. 



Means and Methods of Attainment. 123 

plished when " the love of God is shed abroad in the 
heart." " The end of the commandment is char- 
ity "* — love. 

These considerations suggest 

(a.) That the righteousness imparted is real. 

It is said that Jesus Christ shed His blood for us, 
and as we are justified by faith in His blood, we be- 
lieve, therefore, are saved. This is a kind of a mathe- 
matical transaction — a merely intellectual process — 
having about as much spiritual influence upon the 
character as the solution of a geometrical problem. 

The Blood of Christ is a figurative expression, and 
the world is none the less criminal merely because 
His blood was shed. If one profanes God's name, 
or steals, or kills his neighbor, is his conduct less 
heinous because of the sufferings of the Redeemer? 
Were the Roman soldiers Avho guarded Him to 
Calvary, nailed Him to the cross, and then lifted Him 
up as a vile malefactor, less guilty of their crimes be- 
cause some of His blood was spilt on them? The 
Blood of Christ represents the life He gave to the 
world for us, and gives to us. His death is the 
means of our reconciliation; His life our salvation. 
'* For if, w^hen we were enemies, we were reconciled 
to God by the death of His Son, much more, being 
reconciled, we shall be saved by His life " — by se- 
curing and living the same in Idnd of life that He 
lived. 

*lTim. 1:5. 



124 A Key to True Religion. 

The law, then, is not the source of our salvation. 
Jesus Christ saves us by conforming us to His 
image.* Herein it becomes our delight to obey the 
law, not in the oldness of the letter, but in the new- 
ness of the spirit, f Man's difficulty since the fall is 
his carnality — antagonism to the law. Through 
Jesus Christ, he becomes spiritual — as the law is. :j: 
How significantly St. Paul declares: " Do we make 
void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we 
establish the law^X Therefore the righteousness 
imparted is real — " in us^ 

(b.) The harmony between the Law and the 
Gospel. 

Theological writers and teachers speak, at least,, 
inadvertently of the Law and the Gospel as if there 
were an antagonism between them. This is certainly 
no small error. The Gospel does not, cannot, an- 
tagonize the law, if both are Divine, for God can- 
not so contradict Himself. The Gospel is simply 
God's method of restoring the law to the heart. 

b. The Holy Spirit. 

Far in the dim, misty past — ^before the Bible was 
written — before Moses or Job was born — in the time 
of the antedeluvians, the Holy Spirit strove§ with 
men that they might repent and be saved. The 
natural condition of the heart lacks spiritual vitality, 
though under the influence of truth and grace it 

*Rom. 3: 20. fRom. 7: 6. tl^om. 7: 7-14, 24, 25. 8: 1-2. 
IIRom. 3: 31. §Gen. 6: 3. 



Means and Methods of Attainment. 125 

turns to God. To supply this ^fundamental want in 
his experience, the Holy Spirit sheds abroad the 
Divine love in it, or renews it. 

Even then, in life's sore conflicts, in the hour of 
temptation, wisely the distressed soul cries: '' Take 
not Thy Holy Spirit from me . . . that the 
righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us loho 
walk not after the flesh hut after the Spirit.'''' 

He is not only the Author of the Scriptures, but 
their only effectual Interpreter. The Psalmist 
prayed: ''Open Thou mine eyes, that I may be- 
hold wonder ous things out of Thy law." 

"Perhaps there is no function assigned to the 
Holy Spirit more important for us to understand 
than that by which He assures to the Church a pro- 
found and correct interpretation of Scripture. Ac- 
cording to the Apostle Peter, ' no prophecy of 
Scripture is of any private interpretation;' and the 
reason which he gives for this is philosophically satis- 
factory, viz: as the prophecy did not come by the 
will of man, it cannot be fully comprehended and 
explained by the intellectual powers of men."^ 

He convicts the sinner of his sinfulness, and when 
he becomes penitent He renews his heart in the 
image of Christ. 

c. The Holy Scriptures. 

The Bible is in almost every home throughout the 
land. Its texts are printed on walls and papers, in 

* Paraclete. 



126 A Key to True Religion. 

tracts and in books of business and education. They 
meet the eye wherever it turns; are heard at the 
family altar, are uttered by Christian lips every 
day, and proclaimed from thousands of pulpits every 
week. Their admonitions fall upon the conscience, 
the inborn monitor of the soul, and awaken serious 
thought and spiritual desire. They reveal our sins, 
the danger and destiny to which our sins expose us, 
and also the remedy for our recovery. They do 
not save — they are directory. " Search the Scrip- 
tures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life; 
they are they that testify of Me.'^''^ 

(2.) On the Human Side. 

Two things may be considered as leading to the 
attainment of heavenly life — ^repentence and faith. 

a. The Bible makes mention in some places of 
repentance, and in others of faith, as the human 
side of securing pardon. 

(a.) Some of the references to repentance are: 
" The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken 
heart; and sa/veth such as be of a contrite spirit. . . 
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken 
and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not de- 
spise. . . . He healeth the broken in heart, and 
bindeth up their wounds, f ... I dwell in the 
high and holy place, with him also that is of a con- 
trite and humble spirit, to revive the heart of the 
contrite ones. The Redeemer shall come to Zion, 

n John 5: 29. fPs. 38: 18, 51: 17, 147: 3. 



Means and Methods of Attainment. 127 

and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, 
saith the Lord. . . . He hath sent me to bind up 
the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the cap- 
tives, and the opening of the prison to them that are 
bound. To proclaim the acceptable year of the 
Lord; to comfort all that mourn. ... To that 
man will I look, even to him that is poor, and of a 
contrite spirit, and trembleth at My word.* . . . 
John did baptize in the wilderness, and teach the 
baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. . . 
Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. . . . 
Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth 

more than over ninety and nine just persons 

The publican standing afar off, would not lift up so 
much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his 
breast, saying: God, be merciful unto me, a sinner. 
I tell you this man went down to his how^^ justified 
rather than the other, "f . . . "Repentance and 
remission of sins should be preached in His name." 
(b.) Those respecting faith: " What shall we say 
then that Abraham, our Father, as pertaining to the 
flesh, hath found? For if Abraham were justified 
by works, he hath whereof to glory; but not be- 
fore God. For what saith the Scripture? Abraham 
believed God and it was counted unto him for 
righteousness. Now, to him that worketh is the 
reward not reckoned by grace, but debt. But to him 

* Isa. 57: 15, 59: 20, 61: 1: 2, 66: 2. JRom. 4: 1-5, 5: 1. 

tLuke 13: 3, 15: 7, 18: 13, 14, 24, 36-47. 



138 A Key to True Religion. 

that worketh not, but belie veth on Him that justi- 
fieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteous- 
ness. Therefore, being justified by faith, we have 
peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christij: 
... As many as received Him, to them gave He 
power to become the sons of God, even to them that 
believe on His name. . . . He that believeth on 
the Son hath everlasting life."^ . . . Through His 
name, whoever bcheveth on Him shall receive the 
remission of sins."t 

These are a few of the texts that teach the 
Divine favor through repentance or faith. 

b. If Christianity is the Divine System of Truth 
for man's recovery from sin, and repentance or 
faith is the human condition of its enjoyment, then 
there must be a point of common ground between 
them. Can we find it? It is certainly revealed. 

Repentance is not, as some say, ' ' A Divinely 
wrought conviction of sin, the result of the Holy 
Spirit's application of the condemning law to the 
heart. ":f This is conviction. True a man must be 
convicted of sin before he can repent, yet he may be 
convicted and never repent. Thousands stifle their 
convictions, and live on in rebellion against God. It 
is one thing to be convinced of duty, quite another 
thing to perform it; to be convicted of sin, another to 
repent or forsake it. Thousands are convicted who 
never repent. Conviction is Divinely wrought; re- 

* John 1: 12. f Acts 10: 43. % Pope, Hodge, Watson. 



Means and Methods of Attainment. 129 

pentance is a human act. God convicts, man re- 
pents. God may convict, man refuse' to repent. To 
repent is to change one's mind or purpose — to turn 
from sin to God. Eepenting is getting into a 
reconciled attitude toward God — is turning from 
enmity against, to the love of God. This is plainly a 
heart work, and must embrace the essential element 
of faith. 

What are we to understand by the faith of the 
Gospel? 

It cannot mean the mere belief of the truth, that 
the Bible is the Word of God, or that Jesus is the 
Christ, the Savior of men. Whatever may be neces- 
sary in the faith that secures Divine clemency, such 
a belief may exist with the worst characters. 
The devils beheve the Bible to be true, and 
that Jesus Chiist is the Son of the living God, 
yet it produces no reformation in them. Men 
may learn a great deal of the Scriptures, and enter- 
tain a pretty correct notion of the Christian System, 
and be very wicked with all. The rejection of the 
Gospel by thousands is not for lack of evidence of 
its Divinity, but a want of inclination to accept it. 
St. Paul says: "For with the heart" — ;t:apdm af- 
fection — " Man beheveth unto righteousness^ . . . 
For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth 
anything nor uncircumcision, but faith which 
worketh by love, "f 

* Rom. 10: 10. fGal. 5: 6. 

9 



130 A Key to True Religion. 

Here we have the common ground between re- 
pentance and faith. As repenting is getting into 
an attitude of love, so believing with the heart is 
moving into the same relation to God. True repent- 
ance and saving faith cannot, as we here see, be 
separated. They are one in the surrender of the 
heart to its rightful Sovereign. Eepentance may be 
said to be the beginning of faith; and faith the com- 
pletion of repentance. 

Among the things worthy of observation here, are: 

a. The Source of faith. 

It is declared to be the gift of God, just as the 
husbandman gives the seed to the soil. If this were 
true, we would be about as responsible for our faith 
as for the color of our eyes, and to us there would 
be no virtue in it. If God gives faith in this sense, 
why did Christ rebuke the disciples for their ' ' little 
faith ? " ^ The rebuke proves human responsibihty 
in some way connected with it, and the fact that 
Christ commands us to faith f is further evidence of 
man's capability and accountability in relation to it. 
The faith faculty is God's gift to man in his creation 
and generation. Faculty is defined to be: " Ability 
to act or perform, whether inborn or cultivated; 
especially an original mental power or capacity for 
the well-known classes of mental activity. ":{: The fac- 
ulty is a part of the soul, just as truly as the eye is 
a part of the body. The organ of vision is not 

*Mat. 6: 30. || Mark 1: 15; 11: 13: J Webster. 



Means and Methods of Attainment. 131 

placed in the head after we are born, but enters into 
its constitutional structure. Thus it is with the faith 
faculty, and as there can be no complete human 
body without an eye, so there can be no complete 
soul without this faculty. This can be observed in 
the child; it has the capability to trust its parents — 
a capabihty not given to the child after it is born, 
but the possibihty inwrought into the constitution of 
its soul. 

Upon this susceptibility of our nature are based 
all domestic, social, commercial and international 
relations. Without it there would be no family, no 
society, no commerce, no government. Shops would 
be closed, stores deserted, fields remain unsown, 
and professions forsaken. There would be no con- 
jugal love or friendship, for one would not because 
he could not trust another, and thus the wildest con- 
fusion and anarchy would prevail in all departments 
of life. This is readily seen to be true, and it proves 
that the faculty necessarily enters into the constitu- 
tion of human nature. 

The exercise of this faculty is himian, and it is its 
exercise toward our Lord Jesus Christ that is Bibli- 
cal faith. By this we do not mean, then, that all 
men have evangelical faith. All men have the faith 
faculty, the heathen as ti'uly as the Christian, but 
the heathen has not the Christian faith; not that he 
does not have the susceptibility to trust, but because 
he lacks the Object and light. He might have both. 



133 A Key to True Religion. 

and then refuse to trust the Lord, as thousand do in 
Christian countries. " Grace and truth came by 
Jesus Christ; " repentance and faith are human ex- 
ercises of an inborn faculty of the soul under the in- 
fluence of that grace and truth. That man would 
never have had faith in God after the fall but for 
Divine interposition, is seen in the consideration of 
Christ's relation to salvation. 

h. The reason that "the deeds of the Law" can- 
not save. 

The deeds of the Law respect outer action — mere 
morality — ^which, separated from the heart, however 
benevolent they may appear, cannot be reconcilia- 
tion with God, nor true obedience to the Law, for it 
requires the heart. Hence, '' Though I speak with 
the tongues of men and of angels, and have not char- 
ity" — ayairrj — love — "I am bccomc as sounding 
brass or tinkling cymbal. And though I have the 
gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and 
all knowledge; and though I have faith, so that I 
could remove mountains, and have not love, I am 
nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed 
the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, 
and have not love, it profiteth me nothing."* 

G. The faith of the heart is required; and here we 
see the philosophy of the Gospel's method, and the 
superiority of the Christian system over all other 
systems of religion. 

*lCor. 13: 1-3. 



Means and Methods of Attainment. 133" 

■ ' • ■ ■ ■ — --■ ■ ■ 

In making requisition for Character, Phariseeism 
says: "Give me outward obedience;" the god of 
Kant says: " Give me thy reason; " the god of Mo- 
hammed says: "Give me thy sword;" the gods of 
ancient and modern superstition say: " Give me 
valuable gifts, pious pilgrimages, and bloody sac- 
rifices;" the God of the Bible says: "Give Me 
thy heart." The heart is the battle ground and 
the prize for which are fought the great moral bat- 
ties of the world, and its weal or woe depends upon 
the object of its supreme attachment. 

d. When under the light and influence of truth 
and grace, the heart turns to God, four things may 
be observed. 

(a) He is brought into harmony with the Law. 

(b) Being in an attitude of reconciliation with 
God, he is where, morally, he can be and is for- 
given. 

(c) The heart is made to abound in love by the 
Holy Spirit.^ 

(d) God takes up His abode in the heart. 

A short time before the crucifixion, Jesus said to 
His disciples, ' ' He that hath My commandments,, 
and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me; and he 
that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I 
Avill love him and manifest Mj^self to him. " Judas 
saith unto Him, not Iscariot: " How is it that Thou 
wilt manifest Thyself unto us, and not unto the 

*Rom. 5; 4. 



134 A Key to True Religion. 

world?" Jesus answered and said unto him: "7/^ 
a man love Me^ he will Jceep My words^ and My 
Father will love hiin^ and We will come unto him 
a/)id make Our abode with him. " * Love is the 
point where repentance and faith meet, and where 
the Divine clemency is found — '' where truth springs 
from the earth and righteousness comes down from 
Heaven." f 

An epitome of the means of our salvation is given 
in the Epistle to the Romans: " Now, to Him that 
is of power to establish you according to My Gos- 
pel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to 
the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret 
since the world began, but now is made manifest, 
and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to 
the commandment of the everlasting God, make 
known to all nations for the obedience of faith; to 
God only wise, be glory through Jesus Christ." % 
This gives both the Divine and human aspects of 
man's deliverance from sin. 

We have briefly considered the course pursued 
and means employed for the salvation of men in 
Christian countries, especially by those who concede 
the truth of the Christian System. 

Let us institute another inquiry. 

2. Is there any hope for the man who doubts the 
existence of an Infinite Intelligence, the truth of the 
Holy Scriptures, and the divinity of Christianity ? 

* Jolin 14: 21-23. fPs. 85: 11. X Rom. 16: 25. 



Means and Methods of Attainment. 135 

Is there any way that he can pursue intelligently 
that shall lead him to an apprehension of God, and 
of his relations to Him ? We answer emphatically, 
yes. In giving this answer we do not refer to the 
man who arrogantly negates without a willingness 
to investigate from the standpoint of his own knowl- 
edge and convictions. To such we have nothing to 
say; but to the man who doubts the Divine exist- 
ence, the credibility of the Scriptures, the Christian 
religion, yet willing to follow the light he has and 
the light that may come to him, we have much to 
say. There is a course he can pursue that 
would dissipate his doubts and lead him into the en- 
jojinent of heavenly life. A distinguished religious 
educator has given a most satisfactory presentation 
of such a possibility, which is as follows: ''Every 
human soul, at a certain first point of its religious 
outfit, has a key given it which is to be the open 
sesame of all right discovery. Using this key as it 
may be used, any lock is opened, and doubt dis- 
solved." Here he discusses the universality of con- 
science, and shows that " there may be now and then 
a man who contrives to raise a doubt of it, and yet, 
driven out with rods, it will come back a thousand 
times a day, and force its recognition; especially if 
any one does him a wrong." Here, then, is the key 
that opens ever}i:hing. And the only reason why 
we f aU into so many doubts, and yet unsettled by our 
inquiries, instead of being settled by them, as we un- 



136 A Key to True Religion. 

dertake to be, is that we do not begin at the be- 
ginning. 

'' Of what use can it be for a man to push on his 
inquiries after truth, when he throws away, or does 
not practically honor, the most fundamental and 
most determining of all truths ? He goes after truth 
as if it were coming in to be with him in wrong! 
even as a thief might be going after honest company 
in stolen garments. . . . The way, therefore, 
of dissolving doubts, as I just now said, is to begin 
at the beginning, and do the first things first. Say 
nothing of investigation, till you have made sure of 
being grounded everlastingly, and with a completely 
whole intent, in the principle of right doing as a 
principle. And here it is, let me say, that all un- 
righteous men are at a fault, and often without know- 
ing or even suspecting it. They do right things 
enough in the out-door market sense of the term, 
and count that being right. But let them ask the 
question, ' Have I ever consented to be, and am I 
really now, in the right as in principle and supreme 
law; to live for it, to make any sacrifice it will cost 
me, to believe everything it will bring me to see, to 
be a confessor of Christ as soon as it appears to be 
enjoined upon me, to go on a mission to the world's 
end, if due conviction sends me, to change my occu- 
pation for good conscience sake, to repair whatever 
wrong I have done to another, to be humbled, if I 
should, before my worst enemy, to do complete 



Means and Methods of Attainment. 137 

justice to God, and; if I could, to all worlds? — in a 
word, to be in wholly right intent, and have no 
mind but this forever ? ' Ah, how soon do they dis- 
cover, possibly, in this manner, that they are right 
only so far as they can be, and not be at all right as in 
principle — right as doing some right things, nothing 
more. Of course, they are not going to be mar- 
tyrs in this way, and they have not had a thought 
of it. 

"After this there is not much use in looking far- 
ther, for if we cannot settle ourselves practically in 
this grand fii'st law which we do know, how can we 
hope to be settled in what we do not ? " He gives a 
very beautiful and striking illustration of this prin- 
ciple: " You come upon the hither side of a vast 
intricate forest region, and your problem is to find 
your way through. Will you stand there inquiring 
and speculating forty years, expecting first to make 
out the way ? Or, seeing a few rods into it, will 
you go as far as you see, and so get ability to 
see a few rods farther, proceeding in that manner to 
find out the unknown, by advancing practically in 
the known ? . . . There is no fit search after 
truth which does not, first of all, begin to live the 
truth it knows." To hve in the truth known, to 
adopt and to pursue the right as known, is what he 
understands the Scriptures mean by " a single eye." 
He illustrates and explains the subject farther as 
follows: " Suppose that one of us, clear of all the 



138 A Key to True Religion. 

vices, having a naturally active-minded inquiring 
habit, occupied largely with thoughts of religion — 
never meaning to get away from the truth, but, as 
he thinks, to find it, only resolved to have a free 
mind, and not allow himself to be carried by force 
or fear, or anything but real conviction, — suppose 
that such a one going on thus, year by year, read- 
ing, questioning, hearing all the while the Gospel 
in which he has been educated, sometimes impressed 
by it, but relapsing shortly into greater doubt than 
before, finds his religious beliefs wearing out and 
vanishing, he knows not how, till finally he seems 
to really believe nothing. He has not meant to be 
an atheist, but he is astonished to find that he has 
nearly lost the conviction of God, and cannot, if he 
would, say with any emphasis of conviction that 
God exists. The world looks blank, and he feels 
that existence is getting blank also to itself. 

' 'This heavy charge, of his possibly immortal being, 
oppresses him, and he asks, again and again, ' What 
shall I do with it? ' His hunger is complete, and 
his soul turns every way for bread. His friends do 
not satisfy him. His walks drag heavily. His suns 
do not rise, but only climb. A kind of leaden 
aspect overhangs the world. Till finally, pacing his 
chamber some day, there comes up suddenly the 
question: 'Is there, then, no truth that I do be- 
lieve ? Yes, there is one, now that I think of it; there 
is a distinction between right and wrong; that I 



Means and Methods of Attainment. 139 

never doubted, and I see not how I can; I am quite 
sure of it.' Then, forthwith, starts up the question: 
' Have I, then, ever taken the principle of right for 
my law? I have done right things, as men speak; 
have I ever thrown my life out on the principle to 
become all it requires of me? No, I have not, con- 
scientiously, I have not. Ah ! then there is some- 
thing for me to do ! No matter what becomes of 
my questions, — nothing ought to become of them if 
I cannot take a first principle so inevitably true and 
live in it.' The very suggestion seems to be a kind 
of revelation; it is even a rehef to feel the conviction 
it brings. ' Here, then,' he says, * will I begin. If 
there is a God, as I rather hope there is, and very 
dimly believe. He is a right God. If I have lost 
Him in wi'ong, perhaps I shall find Him in right. 
Will He not help me, or, perchance, even be dis- 
covered to me? ' Now the decisive moment is come. 
He drops on his knees, and there he prays to the 
dim God, dimly felt, confessing the dimness for 
honesty's sake, and asking for help, that he may be- 
gin a right hfe. He bows himself on it as he prays, 
choosing it to be henceforth his unalterable, enternal 
endeavor. It is an awfully dark prayer, in the look 
of it, but the truest and best he can make, — the bet- 
ter and more true that he puts no orthodox colors 
on it; and the prayer and the vow are so profoundly 
meant that his soul is borne up into God's help, as it 
were, by some unseen chariot, and permitted to see 



140 A Key to True Religion. 

the opening of heaven, even sooner than he opens his 
eyes. He rises, and it is as if he had gotten wings. 
The whole sky is luminous about him, — it is the 
morning, as it were, of a new eternity. After this, 
all troublesome doubt of God's reality is gone, for 
he has found Him. A Being so profoundly felt, 
must inevitably be. 

" Now this conversion, calling it by that name, as 
we properly should, may seem, in the apprehension 
of some, to be a conversion /br the Gospel, and not 
in it or hy it\ a conversion by the want of truth, 
more than by the power of truth. "^ 

Through conscience, man's moral sensing faculty, 
God acts to convince the soul of wrong. This is as 
applicable to the heathen as to us, their conscience 
witnessing to them of evil they commit, whenever 
they violate their own standard of moral right. 

We know not what Divine aid is extended to them 
to obey the dictates of conscience and to elevate their 
understanding of right, but certainly to the extent as 
to render them morally accountable to God for their 
conduct. Under the omnipresent influence of the 
Holy Spirit, here and there is one who reaches a 
point where the law of God is re-written on his 
heart, t Hence, to all is the possibility of salvation. 
This does not, however, preclude the necessity of 
sending them the Gospel, for few, if any of us, are 
so bhnd that we do not see the necessity of its con- 

*Serinons on Living Subjects. fRom. 2: 14, 15. 



Means and Methods of Attainment. 141 

tinual proclamation, and the indispensibleness of 
Christian influence, in communities already Chris- 
tian. How soon society would become intolerably 
corrupt without it ! In defiance of its teachings and 
outer restraint, how much maliciousness and sin ! 
When Thomas Pain showed his manuscript of ' ' The 
Age of Reason " to Benjamin Franklin, after read- 
it, the Doctor wisely remarked: ' ' I would burn this 
piece at once. Do not attempt to unchain the 
tiger ! If men are so bad with the Bible, what 
would they be without it ? " 

If the necessity exists for its influence in com- 
munities already Christian, how much more in those 
blackened by heathen superstition, wretchedness and 
crime ? Pure philanthropy impels men to send the 
Gospel, and this love, having its source in the love of 
God, is inspiring men and women to leave the joys 
of home and the comforts of Christian civilization to 
bear the message of mercy to the degraded millions. 
Before this oncoming light that darkness is giving 
way, and the time is rapidly approaching when '' the 
kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms 
of God and of His Christ. " 



CHAPTER IX. 

REASONS ASSIGNED FOR SUPREME LOVE TO GOD. 

From the heart spring all our noble or ignoble, 
pure or impure, purposes and plans, and in it the 
power is generated for their execution. No one can 
live above his heart, any more than the stream can 
rise above its source. As it is, the man is; change 
it, and the man changes. As it is supremely in- 
terested in objects of a higher or lower character, it 
rises or sinks, in the scale of moral virtue. 

For man to be harmonious within himself, and 
properly adjusted in his relations to others; in fact, 
to answer the end of his being, he must be supremely 
devoted to God. 

It is not arbitrary, but merciful, that our Heavenly 
Father demands: " Son, give Me thine heart, "^ and 
in it we may see the spirit of pure benovelence. AU 
who have become truly obedient to its requirement, 
can cheerfully say: " Whom have I in heaven but 
Thee ? and there is none upon earth I desire beside 
Thee." 

Among the reasons we may assign for loving God 
supremely, are, 

*Prov. 23 : 36. fPsalm 73 : 25. 

(142) 



Reasons Assigned foi' Supreme Love to Ood. 143 

1. It is Scripturally enjoined. 

Whatever may be implied in the words of the 
Master, in reply to the question, "Which is the great 
commandment?" they teach this relation to God: 
''Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, and mth all thy soul, and with all thy 
mind.""^ It is taught in the words: " And every 
one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sis- 
ters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or 
lands, for My name's sake, shall receive an hundred 
fold, and shall inherit everlasting life."f This does 
not mean that we shall give up property which is 
lawfully ours, or to abandon our industi'ial pursuits 
if they be honorable and useful. The Lord has 
taught us to till the soil, to plant the seed, to 
cultivate the fields and to gather the golden harvests 
of grain and of fruits; to put out our money at rea- 
sonable interest, and to sail the seas, to carry on the 
commerce of nations and the industries of the world. 
God has constituted us for a life of activity and 
labor, and the condition of society requires that the 
business interests of the world be sustained. Hence 
the demand: "Be diligent in business,":}: and the 
rebuke of the sluggard and idler. But none of our 
business employments must interfere with our 
supreme loyalty to God. Some permit their busi- 
ness to absorb them, taking not only the six days for 
such labor, but, also, often, the day of rest. 

*Deut. 6: 5. jMatt, 19: 24. tRom. 12: 11 



144 A Key to THie Beligion. 

When the industries of the world are employed 
for mere gain, instead of means to an end — to aid in 
carrying on the benevolences of society, they be- 
come sin, for is not the great end of life '' to glorify 
God, and to enjoy Him forever? ""^ 

Nor are we to understand by it that we are to dis- 
regard our domestic relations. The family is the 
first and most sacred of all social institutions, and 
the marital bond is such that a man shall leave 
father and mother and cleave unto his wife, the 
twain becoming one flesh. 

The Holy Scriptures do not teach us to love our 
friends less, but to love God more. ' ' He that loveth 
father or mother morethsna. Me is not worthy of Me; 
and he that loveth son or daughter more than Me is 
not worthy of Me." f 

2. It brings us under the influence of the only 
properly regulating and controlling power of our 
nature. 

As the sun, by the influence of gravitation, holds 
the planets in their respective orbits, so the Lord 
Jesus Christ, the Sun of Eighteousness, by the 
gravitating influence of His love, keeps us in the 
true orbit of life. 

Consciously or unconsciously, man is striving to 
please the object of his love, and when he has God as 
the object of supreme devotion, he shall then sustain 
true relations to self, to family and to the world. 

* Confessions of Faith. f Matt. 10: 37. 



Reasons Assigned for Supreme Love to God. 145 

Drunkenness, licentiousness, covetousness, theft, 
quarreling, war, murder, and the whole train of sins 
shall disappear, as hoar frost before the warm beams 
of the summer sun. Paradise shall be restored, and 
God everywhere honored and adored. 

"Now, supposing this principle to exist in the 
human mind, either by being originally implanted, 
as in Adam, or being restored under the name of a 
Kegencration or New Creation, we naturally pro- 
ceed to inquire what relation it holds to the other 
principles in this department of the mind, and what 
results are likely to attend upon it. In point of 
mere rank, (that is to say, in the position which it 
occupies and ought to occupy, in our estimation) we 
cannot hesitate to say that it stands first, not only 
before the Appetites and Propensities, but before all 
other Aflections, the class with which it is itself 
properly arranged; taking the precedence by an in- 
calculable remove, not only of the love of country, 
and the love of friends, but of the love of parents 
and children. ' He that loveth father or mother 
more than Me, is not worthy of Me; and he that 
loveth son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy 
of Me.' The beneficial results connected with the 
exercise of this principle are such as might be ex- 
pected fi'om the pre-eminent rank it sustains. ^\Tien 
it is in its full exercise, rendered to its appropriate ob- 
ject, in the language of Scripture, with all the heart, 
and mind, and soul, it may be regarded as a matter 
10 



146 A Key to Trv£ Religion. 



of course that all the subordinate principles will be 
kept in their place. The appetites, the propensities 
and the domestic affections still exist; but such is 
the ascendency of love to the Supreme Being, that 
every inordinate tendency is rebuked, and they all 
revolve in the circle which God, in the beginning, 
assigned to them. . . . We feel, under the influ- 
ence of this exalting affection, that we cannot so much 
dishonor our Maker; we cannot estimate so slightly 
those claims of gratitude which He has upon us; we 
cannot so basely condemn our infinite obligations to 
His wisdom and benevolence, as to indulge for a 
moment any exercise of the passions which He has 
forbidden. They stand rebuked and withering in 
the presence of the object that has dominion in our 
hearts. But only obliterate the principle of love to 
God, and at once a thousand motives, which enabled 
us to keep them in their place, are lost in the extinc- 
tion of the principle on which they rested; and other 
principles, infinitely below it, at once gain the as- 
cendency."* 

It is, therefore, as philosophical as it is Biblical, 
that we should love God supremely. True — 

" Thou art the sun and center of all minds. 
Their only point of rest, Eternal Word ! 

From Thee, departing, they are lost and rove 
At random, without honor, hope or peace. 

From Thee is all that sooths the life of man, — 
His high endeavor and his glad success. 

His strength to suffer, and his will to serve." f 

* Mental Philosophy— Upham. f Couper. 



Reasons Assigned for Supreme Love to God. 147 

3. The care he has given and the love he extends 
to us. 

^Yhose care and love shall we employ to represent 
the Divine ? It has but faint resemblance upon 
earth. In human society, there are, perhaps, the 
greater in those of a mother. It was her travail that 
gave us birth; upon her tender arms our infant form 
found rest; she nourished us upon her bosom; she 
sang the lula-bies that quieted our agitations and 
hushed us to sleep; she cared for the tottering steps 
of our childhood, and now, though she is old, the 
rose tint of beauty gone fi^om her cheek, the sparkle 
from her eye, and elasticity from her step, her in- 
terest and love for us are undiminished. But has 
the march of time carried her away ? Is there a 
vacant old arm chair that speaks — she is gone f 
How sweet her memory still; it hngers hke perpet- 
ual sunshine upon our hearts. 

It is not strange that Couper, on viewing a por. 

trait of his long-lost mother, should give expression 

to his feelings as we find in his poem beginning: 

" O that those lips had language ! Life has passed 
With me but roughly since I saw thee last, 
Those lips are thine — thy own sweet smile I see: 
The same that oft in childhood solaced me; 
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say — 
' Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away.^ 
Faithful remembrance of one so dear, 
O welcome guest, though unexpected here 1 
Who bidst me honor with artless song. 
Affectionate, a mother lost so long. "* 

* My Mother's Picture. 



148 A Key to True Religion. 

This has pathetic illustration in an incident in the 
life of the late Bishop Thomson. His historian 
says of him: " As a son^ no child could be more 
dutiful or affectionate. When liis mother visited 
him at Delaware, his reverence for her was conspic- 
uous. Before all the students he paid her the most 
deferential regard. Nor was this an empty show; 
it was the feeling of his heart. ' I have sometimes 
thought,' says he, ' that should I ever become a luna- 
tic, I would be an idolator, and, drawing my 
mother's image, I should kneel before it. Lay me 
down, said the poet, when I die, upon the grass, and 
let me see the Sun. Rather, would I say, lay me 
down to die where I can see my mother. Let the 
last sensation which I feel in the body be the im- 
pression of her lips upon my cheek; and let the last 
sound my departing spirit hears be the voice of my 
mother whispering Jesus in my cold ear. ' " ^ 

Yet how feebly these, and all we could add, rep- 
resent the care and love of our Lord for us, and of 
the reverence and devotion we owe Him. How 
signficant the words: "Thou hast possessed my 
reins; Thou hast covered me in my mother's womb; 
I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully and wonder- 
fully made. Marvelous are Thy works; and that 
my soul knoweth right well. My substance was 
not hid from Thee, when I was made in secret, and 
curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. 

* Biography of Bishop Thomson. 



Reasons Assigned for Supreme Love to God. 149 

Thine eye did see. my substance, yet being imper- 
fect; and in Thy book all my members were T\a-itten, 
which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet 
there were none of them.* — For in Him we live 
and move and have our being, f — Every good gift 
and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh 
down from the Father of Lights, with whom is no 
variableness, neither shadow of turning. " ;): Add to 
this incomprehensible care his incomparable love. 

It is a historic, as well as a Biblical fact, that 
'' Greater love hath no man than this, that a man 
lay down his life for his friends. For scarcely for a 
righteous man will one die; yet, peradventure, for a 
good man some would even dare to die. But God 
commendeth His love toward us, in that while we 
were yet sinners Christ died for us. " || In this, 
divine love has, perhaps, its greatest manifestation. 
Calvary seems indeed a point where love di^dne 
converges and from whence it radiates all over the 
world. " I can measure parental — how broad, how 
long and how strong, and how deep it is: it is a sea; 
a deep sea. But the love displayed on yonder hill 
and bloody cross, where God's own Son is perishing 
for us, nor man nor angel has a line to measure. 
" The circumference of the earth, the altitude of the 
sun, the distance of the planets — these have been 
determined; but the height, depth, breadth and 
length of the love of God passeth knowledge. Such 

*Ps. 129: 13-16. f Acts 17: 28. t James 1: 17. || John 15: 13. 



150 A Key to True Religion. 

is the Father, against whom all of us have sinned a 
thousand times ! Walk the shore where the ocean 
sleeps in the summer calm, or lashed into fury by 
the winter's tempest, is thundering on her sands, 
and when you have numbered the drops of her waves, 
the sand on her sounding beach, you have numbered 
God's mercies and your sins. Well, therefore, may 
we go to Him with contrition of the prodigal in our 
hearts, and his confession on our lips — ' Father, I 
have sinned against Heaven and in thy sight. ' The 
Spirit of God helping us thus to go to God, be as- 
sured that the father, who, seeing his son afar off, 
ran to meet him, fell on his neck and kissed him, 
was but an image of Him, who, not sparing His 
Own Son, but giving Him up to death that we 
might live, invites and now awaits our coming. " * 

Such care and unutterable love as are thus shown 
toward us, teach that we should love Him su- 
premely. 

4. His Illxcellency. 

Where, in all the universe, is there another such 
Being, possessing, as He does, every excellency of 
character, and that to an infinite degree ? He fills 
the universe with His presence, and eternity with 
His duration. The telescope, though it reveals in- 
numerable worlds, it leads us only into the suburbs 
of the empire of the most High. 

Creation reveals also His goodness. There is not 

* Guthrie 



Reasons Assigned for Supreme Love to Ood. 151 

a selfishly destined principle in all that He has 
made. "The heavens declare His glory, and the 
firmament showeth His handiwork. Day unto day 
uttereth speech, and night unto night serveth knowl- 
edge. There is no speech nor language where their 
voice is not heard. Their hne is gone out through 
all the earth, and their words to the end of the 
world." "^ Sunshine and shower fall upon the fields 
of all, and in this something of the Divine heart is 
known. Though the heavens and the earth speak 
of God, and through which we learn much of Him, 
Jesus Christ is now the only clearly uttered Word 
of God. The light of the knowledge of the divine 
glory is in His face — God manifested in the flesh. His 
sympathy with the sufiering, mercy to the fallen, pa- 
tience with the thoughtlessness of His own people, 
love toward his enemies, and solicitude for the sal- 
vation of the world, are expressions of divine char- 
acteristics. The character and conduct of Jesus 
Christ reveal him as the fairest among ten thousand, 
and the One that is altogether lovely. " Put the 
beauty of ten thousand paradises like the Garden of 
Eden into one; put all trees, all flowers, all smells, 
all colors, all tastes, all joys, all sweetness, all love- 
liness in one — oh, what a fair and excellent thing it 
would be ! And yet it would be less to that fair and 
dearest, well-beloved Christ, than one drop of rain 
to the whole seas, rivers, lakes and fountains of ten 

*Ps. 19: 1-4. 



152 A Key to True Religion. 

thousand earths. " * In Him is every excellency of 
character and being that demand for Him supreme 
homage, and should attract the undivided love of 
every heart. 

We should, then, love God supremely, as His 
Word enjoins it; the proper government of our nat- 
ures require it. His care and love demand it, and 
His excellency is worthy of it. 

Thus we should say: 

'* Thee will I love, my joy, my crown; 
Tliee will I love, My Lord, my God; 

Thee will I love beneath Thy frown 
Or smile, Thy scepter or Thy rod. 
What though my flesh and heart decay. 
Thee will I love in endless day." 

*Flarel. 



CHAPTEE X. 

THE EXTENT OF ITS ENJOYIVIENT. 

Living on the lower planes of life, we deem it 
scarcely possible to attain to communion and fellow- 
ship with the Lord, and in the region of feeble faith 
we are often inclined to the belief that God has no 
better experience for us in this world than moral 
weakness, embarrassment, and sometimes defeat 
and sin. 

We say there must be great contrast between 
saintship as experienced on earth and saintship in 
glory. Here we often feel our feebleness, imper- 
fections and reproaches; our interrupted joys and 
little comfort. 

In Heaven they worship God with pure devotion, 
and in perpetual rapture. They look with unclouded 
vision into the wonders of His dominion, and 
behold Him with a gaze that is both transforming 
and satisfying. They have no sin, no sorrow, no 
crying. With voices that cannot be drowned with 
all the glorious minstrelsy of Heaven, they join in 
their matchless anthem: '' Unto Him that loved us 
and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and 
hath made us kings and priests unto God and His 

(153) 



154 A Key to True Religion. 

Father; to Him be glory and dominion forever and 
ever. Amen.""^ 

But may we not attain unto a like character 
to theirs, and constantly approximate their joy until 
we shall with them experience the fullness of heavenly 
life? 

The first experience of saving grace is: 

1. Renewal, sometimes erroneously called con- 
version. 

Conversion, as taught in the Holy Scriptures, does 
not mean '^the new birth," but, more properly, the 
act of the creature in turning from some error, 
or a sinful life, and is more closely related to re- 
pentance. An example of this is found in an in- 
cident that occurred at Capernaum, in which Christ 
told the disciples, not the world of sinners, that, 
" Except ye be converted^ and become as little chil- 
dren, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. 
Whosoever, therefore, shall humble himself as this 
little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of 
heaven, "f In this Christ taught the disciples that 
except they turn away from their ambition for 
prominence, such an experience would lead them 
out of the Divine favor here, and exclude them at 
last from the kingdom of ultimate glory. 

What are we to understand by ' ' Divine Renewal " 
or "the New Birth?" If it is true, as we have 
shown, that moral depravity does not consist in the 

*Rev. 1:5, 6. f Matt. 18:34. 



The Extent of its Enjoyment. 155 

destruction of any moral faculty, then no experience 
of grace in this life necessarily creates any, unless 
we assume that there was a deficiency in the original 
moral constitution of man, which is not supposable. 

AYhateyer influence "the new birth "may have 
on the physical and intellectual natures of man, its 
work is principally in the aflection, the fountain of 
good or e^dl within us. " Out of the heart are the 
issues of life.""^ If it is not the creation of any new 
faculty of the mind, it must consist in changing some 
existing nature. It is well defined, — "the renewal 
of the heart " — the seat and source of aflection. 
This accords with the teaching that we are new, not 
other creatures, in Christ. 

If "As a man's love is, his life is," \ then, when 
his heart is changed, his life is changed — " old tilings 
pass away, and all things become new. " X 

l^Tioever is actuated by the principle of love to 
God, experiences what Christ teaches in the words: 
" Ye must be born again — born of the Spirit." || In 
other words, the right state of the affection and the 
new birth are identical. " He that loveth is born of 
of God."§ It contains all the characteristics of " the 
new birth." As in white all the colors unite, so 
love embraces all Christian graces. It is that Divine 
experience that " Suffereth long, and is kind; it 
envieth not; it vaunteth not itself, and is not pufied 

* Prov. 4: 23. + Swedenbiirg. % 2 Cor. 5: 17. 

I John 3: 3. § IJohn 4: 7. 



156 A Key to True Religion. 

up; doth not behave itself unseemly; seeketh not its 
own; is not easily provoked; thinketh no evil; re- 
joiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; 
beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all 
things, endureth all things."*^ It is the fontal vir- 
tue from which all others flow. " The fruit of the 
Spirit is love — joy, peace, long sufiering, gentle- 
ness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. " f 

When the heart has this experience, it correspond- 
ingly controls intellect and body. It moves the in- 
tellect to gain knowledge of the Divine will, and the 
body to perform deeds according to His pleasure. 
Thus the whole man is influenced and controled by 
the state of the heart. Here the Christian's sphere 
of usefulness may become wider every day, and he 
be enabled to employ better means and methods for 
doing good. / 

2. There is an interesting Spanish legend that for 
a long time there was inscribed on the western face 
of the rock Gibralter the words, " neplus ultra " — 
signifying to sailors, adventurers and to all, that no 
land existed west of Europe. When Columbus 
sailed by it on his great expedition of discovery, he 
chipped ofi" the word " ?i^," leaving those expressing 
*' inore heyond^^^ which proved to be a real prophecy. 

In the domain of the spiritual, some have en- 
graved on their theology — " The new birth — ne 
jplu8 loltra. " 

*lCor. 13:4-7. f Gal. 5:22, 23. 



The Extent of its Enjoyment. 157 

A spiritual Columbus, sailing upon the ocean of 
Di\dne truth and Christian experience, has shown us 
that there is mor^e heyond. 

The almost, if not quite, universal experience of 
the rencTved heart is, that such is the feebleness of 
love toward God, that evil influences break in upon 
it to the extent that one feels something of his 
former experience. This is not necessarily a state 
of alienation from God. The renewed heart is not 
in a state of alienation, but does realize a spiritual 
feebleness that causes it pain. " Be ye angiyand 
sin not," ^ is evidence that sin is not necessarily 
committed in the experience of the angiy feeling. 
To the new convert it has been a source of annoy- 
ance and discouragement, and sometimes causes him 
to relapse into a life of sin. He entertained a false 
estimation of his spiritual condition, mthdrew his 
heart from God, and drifted back into the cun'ent of 
merely worldly afiections; when, if he had continued 
loyal to God, he would have been led into complete 
victoiy. 

The question still presses us, To what extent 
may we enjoy the heavenly Kfe in this world? We 
answer. To the extent that we will not experience 
an}i;hing contrary to the love of God and the neigh- 
bor, and the possibihty of making endless progress 
in Divine knowledofe and love. 

This higher exjDerience of grace is called " per- 

* Eph. 4: 26. 



158 A Key to True Religion. 

feet love. " While we are instructed that we may be 
angry and sin not, we are taught another possibility 
in immediate connection with this Scripture: " Let 
all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, 
and evil speaking, be put away from you with all 
malice. " '^ 

In the first, a man may, under certain provoca- 
tions, feel anger ^ but he controls it by the aid of 
divine grace; in the second, when he is reviled, he 
does not only not revile again, but there is the ab- 
sence of the feeling of revenge. 

We may briefly consider evidences of this state as 
given — 

(1) By men. 

'^ Perfect love constitutes evangelical perfection, 
sum of all duties, the bond which binds all virtues 
into unity. As we stand midway between the per- 
fect estate of paradise lost and paradise regained, re- 
greting the one and aspiring to the other, but ex- 
cluded so long as we are in the flesh, our gracious 
God, through the mediation of Christ, commissions 
the Holy Ghost to come down and open the gates of 
a new paradise of love made perfect; love casting 
out fear; love fully shed abroad in our hearts." f 

(2) In the Ecclesiastical recognition of it. 

The doctrine is taught in the questions propounded 
to candidates for Orders in a certain Ecclesiastical 
Body. 

*Eph. 4: 26, 31. f Dr. Steele in Love Enthroned. 



The Extent of its Enjoyment. 159 

"1. Have you faith in Christ ? 

" 2. Are you going on to perfection ! 

" 3. Do you expect to be made perfect in love in 
this life? 

'' 4. Are you earnestly striving for it ? " * 

The first question implies a state of justification 
that the person seeking orders is in a state of divine 
renewal; the second, that there is a state of grace 
beyond ''regeneration" called perfection; the third, 
the nature of the perfection and when it is attain- 
able — "perfect in love in this life." The fourth 
question implies such an interest in seeking it as 
produces earnest striving for it. 

(3) The Word of God. 

" Brethren, I wTite no new commandment unto 
you, but an old commandment which ye had from 
the beginning. The old commandment is the word 
which ye heard fi'om the beginning. Again, a new 
commandment I write unto you, which thing is true 
in Him and in you; because the darkness is past, 
and the true light now shineth." f Is this not para- 
doxical? — "I write no new commandment — a new 
commandment I write." But it is explained in the 
words: "The old commandment that ye heard 
from the beginning is, that ye love one another.'^'' X 
"Anew commandment I give unto you. That ye 
love one another as I have loved you^ \ It is not 

*M. E. Discipline. f 1 John 2: 7, 8. X\ John 3: 11. 
II John 13: 34. 



160 A Key to True Religion. 

new in the sense of being another, but degree. The 
first or old commandment i^ '''Love one another;'''' 
the second is the same in kind but different in de- 
gree — " Love one another as I have loved you.'''' 
Herein we have taught the higher experience of 
Christianity. 

Among other texts of Scripture, teaching this ex- 
perience, are: '' But whoso keepeth His word, in him 
verily, is the love of God perfected. " * ... If 
we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his 
love is perfected in us. God is love; and he that 
dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him. 
Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have 
boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, 
so are we in this world. " f These words teach the 
extent of its enjoyment ''in this world." This ex- 
perience is all that can be meant by entire sanctifica- 
tion. To sanctify generically signifies to make holy 
whatever application may be made of it in the sense 
of consecration. Sanctify is formed of sa/fictus, 
holy, and facere., to make, which together mean — 
to make holy. 

Entire sanctification, perfect love, entire holiness, 
are identical, signifying the same experience in both 
kind and degree. It requires but little effort to see 
that "the new birth" is sanctification begun, and 
that love made perfect is sanctification completed. 
This high experience of grace is contrary to the 

* 1 Jolin 2:5. f 1 John 4: 12, 17, 18. 



The Extent of its Enjoyment. 161 

spirit of censoriousness and uncharitable criticisms 
often observed in those who profess much grace. 
He who lives on the highest sunny table-land of life 
is he who loves God most, and is tenderest in his 
sympathies with and helpfulness for men. 

It is also important to consider that whatever de- 
gree of grace may be experienced in this life, it does 
not destroy any of the instincts or passions that 
naturally belong to man; without them we would 
not be human. Let us here notice: 

(4.) Some things to be considered as consistent 
with this experience. 

a. The essential instincts, appetite and passions. 
We should learn to distinguish between them and 
" the feelings of the carnal mind." Our Heavenly 
Father does not design to destroy those instincts, 
appetites and passions in this world, but enable us 
to employ them in legitimate uses. 

Fleshly feehngs spring up involuntarily, and are 
not subject to the will. Their indulgence must have 
our consent, and in it we are responsible. Hence, 
we should not forget to discriminate between a ma- 
levolent feeling which belongs to the heart, and 
may be entirely removed by the Holy Spirit, and 
those feelings that we experience in the body, and 
shall continue with us so long as we remain in the 
flesh. 

b. Mental wanderings. These have sometimes 
been confounded with alienation of heart from God. 

11 



162 A Key to True Religion. 

While a certain degree of mental discipline is neces- 
sary to secure concentration of thought upon any 
subject, we are necessarily so constituted mentally 
that the associations of memory and the flights of 
imagination can no more be controlled, absolutely, 
than we can control the lightnings of heaven. With 
the associations of memory and the wonderful power 
of imagination, continuous discourse is possible, for 
while we are talking, we are also gathering and 
arranging ideas and illustrations on the hne of our 
theme. 

As we devoutly pray for our friend, the associa- 
tions of memory suggesting how long he has suf- 
fered and severe his trials, right while we are pray- 
ing for him, only increase our sympathies in his be- 
half and intensify the earnestness of the prayer. 
These wanderings of mind are no evidences of any 
heart alienation from God. 

c. Temptations of Satan. To these we shall be 
exposed so long as we live. They need not prove a 
calamity to us, but serve a disciplinary purpose. 
'' Jesus was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness 
to be tempted of the devil," and as He was without 
sin, so there is no sin in being tempted. As by the 
direct action of spirit upon spirit, he can convey an 
impression to the mind, as we can through the 
the senses. So whatever vile temptations he may 
present to us, and however deeply he may impress 
us with them, there is no contamination of heart, 



The Extent of its Enjoyment. 163 

unless we enter into sympathy with them. Hence, 
whatever evil may be suggested for our indulgence, 
whether originating in the flesh or direct suggestions 
of Satan to the mind, do not necessarily imply a 
wrong state of the heai-t, and any and all are con- 
sistent with the higher experience of grace. "^ 

We are to understand, then, that the instincts, 
passions, appetites, the wanderings of mind and the 
temptations of Satan shall follow us to the grave. 
We may hesitate and refuse to do a good work, as 
did Peter when called to preach to Cornelius, even 
after he had received the Pentecostal Baptism. We 
cannot always obey the Golden Eule in the estima- 
tion of others, for while we do unto them as we 
would have them do unto us, it may not be their 
notion of the Rule. Hence, we are Biblically enjoined 
to live '' in holiness and righteousness tefore God^'^\ 
for He looketh upon the heart, but man looketh 
upon the outer. 

In the higher experience of gTace, however, the 
difficulties that may arise within us are more easily 
swept away. In the conflicts hatred is not felt, the 
struggles are usually shorter, and victory sweeter. 
The reason is apparent: There is no improper re- 
sponse within the heart, and though the flesh may 
quiver responsively to the temptation, the soul holds 
on to God, conscious of no feeling of disloyalty. 
The whole man is carried with the current, though 

* Condensed from Infancy and Manhood, f Luke 1 : 76. 



164 A Key to True Religion. 

annoyed with the eddying waves. In Minnesota 
we find the Summit of the Central Table-land of the 
North American Continent, where, within a few 
miles of each other the sources of rivers are, and 
where the waters of some of them, running north- 
ward, have their outlets in Hudson Bay. Sailing up 
the rivers from farther south, one would move 
against the current until he would strike those flow- 
ing in an opposite direction. Thus the Christian 
may reach a point in the experience of grace where 
the whole current of his heart turns Godward. 

3. Possible progress. 

Wisdom, in a higher sense, is the union of knowl- 
edge and love. There may be knowledge without 
love, but love impels to knowledge. God is infinite 
in knowledge and love; therefore infinite in wisdom. 
Man is finite; the eternal hmitation of his knowledge 
because of his finiteness, forever limits his wisdom. 
Herein may be observed the possibility of unending 
progress. Knowledge constantly increasing, widens 
the sphere of his mental vision and benevolent action, 
and, as there may be an increase of capacity for en- 
joyment, as well as an enlargement of the mental 
vision, there is certainly no point attainable in this 
life beyond where he may not go. The possibility 
of the Christian's progess may be as illimitable as 
eternity future, and there is pleasure in the thought 
that interminable ages of progression are before us. 

To the present possible experience of grace let us 



The Extent of its Enjoyment. 165 

now attain. To its enjoyment the Divine Master 
invites us: " Ask largely that your joys be full.* 
. . . If earthly parents, being evil, know how to 
give good gifts unto their children, how much more 
willing our Heavenly Father to give the Spirit unto 
those that ask Him." f United to this "much more 
willingness " is the assurance of his wondrous and 
glorious ability to give — "able to do exceeding 
abundantly above all that we can ask or think." :j: 

" Finish, then, Thy new creation; 
Pure and spotless let us be; 
Let us see Thy great salvation 
Perfectly restored in Thee ; 
Changed from glory into glory. 
Till in Heaven we take our place, 
Till we cast our crowns before Thee, 
Lost in wonder, love and praise." 

* John 16: 24. f Luke 11: 13. % Eph. 3: 20. 



CHAPTER XI. 

CONCLUDING STATEMENTS. 

Nothing takes place without leaving traces behind 
it. The fertile soil that has received the touch of 
intelligent labor, and the blessings of sunshine and 
shower, yields golden harvests of fruit and grain, 
and lifts its shade trees and flowers. That over 
which the wild wind howls, tornado ploughs, or 
volcano blackens and rends into awful caverns, 
bears the record of the events with which it has been 
connected. This not more manifest in the material 
than in the social world. The events that have 
taken place in it leave the impress of their character 
and reveal the causes in which they originated. 

It was but yesterday we beheld beauty and bless- 
ing aU about us; but to-day the whole aspect is 
changed; there is blight instead of beauty, sorrow 
instead of joy, pain instead of pleasure, and the dark- 
ness of despair for the brightness of hope. 

Nations unite for the promotion of peace, and adopt 
measures for the prosperity of their respective com- 
monwealths. Their flags wave courtesies upon the 
deep; their ships plough the sea to do the business 
of travel, and to carry on the interests of commerce. 
By and by a change comes; international relations 

(166) 



Concluding Statements. 167 

are disregarded; ships, instead of being ladened 
with cargoes for trade, are burdened with soldiers to 
fight and weapons to kill; the accumulated indus- 
tries of the people are consumed for war; asylums 
for the distressed and oppressed, institutions of 
learning and religion, homes of pleasure and plenty, 
are ruined; prosperity ceases, and nations are bap- 
tized with tears and blood. It is trite but true that 
every effect must have an adequate cause. Revela- 
tion and experience teach that the causes are in the 
right or wrong states of the heart. When men's 
hearts are right toward each other you hear no war 
cry, no clash of arms, no groans of wounded and 
dpng men upon gory fields — nothing that destroys 
the blessed hopes of men or injures the interests of 
society. St. Paul speaks of the carnal and the spir- 
itual states of mind as follows: " Now, the works of 
the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultry, forn- 
ication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witch- 
craft, hatred, variance, emulations, wi'ath, strife, 
seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, 
revelings, and such Kke. . . . But the fruit of 
the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentle- 
ness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.""^ 

1. Leaving the exterior natm'e, which may be a 
medium of temptation and present occasions to sin 
and passing into the interior region where the source 
of moral evil is, he employs a peculiarly appropriate 

* Gal. 5: 19. 



168 A Key to True Religion. 

word to express the character of that source — 
'^ Hatred.'''' This is identical with the carnal mind 
or moral depravity, and is the condition of heart 
from which flow all the crimes of the universe, for 
moral evil must be the same in both men and devils. 
St. Paul mentions eight grades of experience as 
springing from this disposition, beginning in " var- 
iance," and following a graduated series has its 
awful climax in ''''irmrder.'''' 

The seeker of spiritual truth will be benefited in 
studying the meaning of each word and its relation 
to his experience: "Hatred — variance, emula- 
tion, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, env3dngs, 
murders. " Kelated to those of the carnal mind are 
those that have their occasion in the flesh. They 
are: ''Adultry, fornication, uncleanness, lascivious- 
ness, idolatry, witchcraft, drunkenness, revellings, 
and such like." These break in through a feeble 
moral character or express a bad state of the heart. 

What a parent is Hate ! What a breeder of dis- 
content, weakness, wretchedness, and woe ! In its 
path are ruined cities, devastated fields, demolished 
forests, fallen virtue ! Whatever are heartrending, 
black with crime, terrible in suflering, and awful in 
destiny are found in its merciless course. Here the 
poor go uncared for and the sick are unpitied; here 
the rich man left Lazarus without food or medical 
aid, except what his dogs rendered, until the angels 
of God came and took him to Glory; here — behold 



Concluding Statements. 169 

all the moral disruptions and woes of the universe ! 
" Of the which I forewarn you, even as I did fore- 
warn you, that they which practice such things shall 
not inherit the kingdom of God." * Just as hate pre- 
vails in the world we have hell on earth; and as it 
prevails in a heart there is within that heart the fires 
of eternal woe. A soul saved from sin, then, is '' a 
brand plucked from eternal burnings " — the same in 
kind, only different in degree. 

2. It is worthy of notice that from the opposite 
disposition St. Paul mentions eight, the same num- 
ber emanating from ''Hatred," and, following a 
graduated series, have a blessed culmination in the 
broader, deeper notion of ''temperance." 

From Love we have all the Christian graces: 
"Love — ^joy, peace, long-suffering; gentleness, good- 
ness, faith, meekness, temperance." "Against such 
there is no law, and they that are Christ's have cru- 
cified the flesh with the passions and lusts thereof. " f 
From this experience spring all the blessed minis- 
tries of the universe. The hungry are fed, the 
naked clothed, the sick visited, the distressed com- 
forted, the wicked warned, and the penitent saved. 
Here the Good Samaritan pom-ed oil and wine into 
the wounds that cruelty had inflicted, put money 
into the pockets that covetousness had robbed, car- 
ried the body that savagery had broken, and gave 
rest and comfort to him whom wickedness disturbed 

*Gal. 5: 21: N. V. fGal. 6: 10. 



170 A Key to True Religion. 

and thought to kill. Through it war becomes a 
moral impossibility. If there ever comes a time 
down the ages, when ' ' nations shall beat their swords 
into plow-shares and their spears into pruning hooks 
and learn war no more," * it will be when the Christ 
life shall everywhere permeate society. The time is 
coming. Divine love is driving moral darkness 
from the valleys, and even the shadows from the 
mountain sides, and we anticipate the era when 
righteousness shall prevail over earth as the waters 
now cover the deep places. 

Reader, what is your experience? What is the 
state of your heart ? Is it supremely devoted to 
God ? Or is it bounded and controlled by social 
relations and the ordinary environments of life % 

Do you love only those who love you ? This is 
merely natural affection. It is good so far as it ex- 
tends, but does not go far enough. It has its source 
in a rivulet instead of the Fountain. It does not 
meet the divine requirement, the necessities of so- 
ciety, nor the wants of your own soul. ''Do not 
the publicans the same ?"f Are you affable and kind 
only when pleasantly surrounded ? If so it is infi- 
nitely important that you at once turn your heart 
over to the Lord Jesus Christ, that He may renew 
it and save you. We should all remember that the 
vitality of our religious life is not the measure of our 
iiffability under pleasant circumstances, but the dis- 

*Isa2:4. f Matt. 5: 46. 



Concluding Statements. 171 

position felt and manifested in times of provocation. 
Does the love of God beat high in your bosom, 
prompting you to deeds of blessedness ? See that 
you abound in the grace. The currents of the world 
tend to wash you back into the old experiences of 
indifference and sin. The price of virtue is unceas- 
ing vigilance. 

''It is not enough to renounce ourselves, and then 
stop. It is not enough to wrap ourselves in our 
close garment of reserve and pride, and say — ' The 
world cares nothing for us, and we will care nothing 
for the world; society does us no justice, and we 
will withdraw from it our thoughts, and see how pa- 
tiently we can live within the confines of our own 
bosom, or in quiet communion, through books, with 
the mighty dead.' No man ever found peace or 
light in this way. The misanthropic recluse is ever 
the most miserable of men, whether he lives in a 
cave or castle. Every relation to mankind of hate 
or scorn or neglect, is full of vexation and torment. 
There is nothing to do mth men but to love them; 
to contemplate their virtues with admiration, their 
faults with pity and forbearance, and their injuries 
with forgiveness. Task all the ingenuity of your 
mind to devise some other thing, but you never can 
find it. To all the haughtiness and wrath of men I 
say — however they may disdain the suggestion — the 
spirit of Jesus is the only help for you. To hate 
your adversary will not help you; to kill him will 



173 A Key to True Religion. 

not help you; nothing within the compass of the 
universe will help you but to love him. Oh^ how 
wonderfully is man shut up to wisdom — harred^ as 
I may say^ and imprisoned and shut up to wisdom y 
and yet he will not learn it. 

" But let that love flow out upon all around you, 
and what could harm you ? It would clothe you 
with an impenetrable, heaven-tempered armor. Or 
suppose, to do it justice, that it leaves you, all de- 
fenceless, as it did Jesus; all vulnerable, through 
delicacy, through tenderness, through pity, suppose 
that you sufier, as all must sufier; suppose that you 
be wounded, as gentleness only can be wounded; 
yet how would that love flow, with precious healing, 
through every wound ! How many difficulties, too, 
both within and without a man, would it relieve ! 
How many dioll minds would it rouse; how many 
depressed minds would it lift up ! How many 
troubles in society would it compose; how many en- 
mities would it soften; how many questions answer ! 
How many a knot of mystery and misunderstanding 
would be untied by one word spoken in a simple and 
confiding truth of heart 1 How many a rough path 
would be made smooth, and crooked way be made 
strait ! How many a solitary place would be 
made glad, if love were there; and how many a dark 
dwelling would be filled with light ! " ^ 

Love may place beautiful and fragrant flowers on 

* Dewey. 



Concluding Statements. 173 

the coffins and graves of the departed, but will not 
forget to strew them in life's pathway. 

And now, brethren, " Grieve not the Holy Spirit 
of God, in whom ye were sealed unto the day of re- 
demption. Let all hitterness^ and wrath^ and anger ^ 
and clamor^ and railing^ he put a/wa/y from you^ 
with all malice; and he ye Mnd^ one to another^ 
tender-hearted^ forgiving each other ^ even as God 
also in Chinst forgave you. Be ye therefore imita- 
tors of God^ as heloved children; and loalk in love., 
even as Christ also loved you., and gave Himself up 
for us^ an offering and a sacrifice to God for an 
odour of a svjeet smell^'' ^ remembering that — 

"Beyond the watching and the weeping, 
Beyond the waking and the sleeping, 
Beyond the sowing and the reaping, 
We shall be soon, 
Love — rest — and home. 

Sweet home ! 
Lord, tarry not, but come ! " 

Amen. 

*Eph. 4: 30-33; 5: 1, 3. N. V. 



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